German Child Distress,US Humanitarian Aid and Revisionist Politics,1918–24

On 15 November 1918, just four days after the armistice, the National Council of German Women appealed to US first lady Edith Wilson to help lift the Allied sea blockade of Germany, which had been left intact even after the fighting had ended:

The German women and children have been starving for years. They will die from hunger by the millions if the terms of the armistice are not changed.… The women and children all the world over have been the innocent sufferers of this terrible war, but nowhere more than in Germany. Let it be through you, Madame, to implore our sisters in the United States of America, who are mothers like ourselves, to ask their Government and the Allied Governments to change the terms of the armistice so that the long suffering of the women and children of Germany may not end in unspeakable disaster. ¹

Reprinted on the front page of the New York Times, the appeal was but one of the earliest in a long series of German attempts to communicate the suffering of its people in order to mobilize US sympathies for a more lenient treatment of the defeated enemy. For years after the war private groups and government offices continued to raise awareness of child suffering not only to garner US funds, but to underline German poverty, victimization and the untenable nature of the peace terms. Especially after 1920 German representations played out strongly against competing French interests in the emerging battle over reparations. At this time, US humanitarian concerns seemed to offer a singularly promising way to reach an otherwise suspicious and uninterested American public and impress it with the reality of German destitution.

Yet concerns over German prestige and national dignity always complicated the ‘diplomacy of pity’ on the German side, while displays of German wealth and political intransigence continued to feed US disbelief and hostility. Though Germany’s restricted room of political manoeuvre repeatedly forced humanitarian appeals as the only option to garner US interest, sympathy and, ultimately, engagement in the reparations question, it was abandoned as soon as alternatives became available in 1924.

Focusing on the origins, implementation and fate of this ‘diplomacy of pity’ allows us to gain a fuller picture of the ways and means by which Weimar Germany sought to achieve one of its principal foreign policy goals: American engagement in the revision of the Versailles peace treaty. As the leading economic power and Allied creditor, US involvement was seen as pivotal to a viable settlement of the reparations question and Germany's financial reconstruction. ² But German governments considerably underestimated the time it would take for the USA’s primarily economic concerns in a stable Europe to translate into political action. ³ Not until late in 1923 did the Coolidge administration push for a reparations settlement through the Dawes expert committee, which finally allowed for the inflow of US capital, or – as contemporaries put it – a ‘dollar sunrise’ over Germany. In the meantime, from 1919 to 1924, the question of how the United States of America, or more accurately, a reluctant US public, could be won for the German cause pre-occupied Weimar's diplomats, politicians and publicists alike. ⁴

Despite the contemporary centrality of the question, we still know surprisingly little about how Germany sought to garner US sympathies. True, the formal part of Germany’s reparations diplomacy has been minutely traced. In conference after conference, Weimar governments sought to downplay their capacity to pay, while pleas of impoverishment and appeals to economic self-interest were to secure US mediation. ⁵ But in terms of winning over the wider US public, the informal part of reparations diplomacy, we are still left relatively in the dark. Especially in the first postwar years, the hostile US climate, this much seems clear, stifled most German attempts at propaganda. ⁶ As a consequence, historians have focused almost exclusively on the most visible, most abrasive German campaign of the early 1920s, which publicized the ‘black horror’, that is the alleged outrages of French colonial troops in the occupied Rhineland, in order to widen the breach between the Allies and secure US support in the reparations negotiations. ⁷ But the focus on this exceptionally sensational campaign has obscured more subtle themes used to purvey a politically desirable German image across the Atlantic. By exploring one of them, the communication of German childhood suffering, the paper paints a more comprehensive picture of Germany’s revisionist public diplomacy in the early 1920s and helps us understand how Germany sought to engage so elusive a power as the postwar USA.

This focus on German appeals also helps de-centre the rapidly growing historiography on US humanitarianism in the era of the First World War. ⁸ In the last few years, innovative studies have underlined humanitarian aid as a central field of American foreign engagement. The extent of suffering caused by the war spurred the growth of increasingly transnational, secular and professional humanitarian structures, which became fundamental to modern international humanitarianism. After the war, non-state humanitarian groups not only administered unprecedented amounts of relief, but advocated the recognition and codification of humanitarian rights for distinct groups of victims, especially children. ⁹ In this respect their pioneering use of sophisticated publicity and fundraising techniques has drawn increasing attention. The effective language and imagery of suffering they developed to mobilize empathy for war victims played a crucial role in garnering interest and support for otherwise ‘distant others’. ¹⁰ In this way, humanitarian campaigns meaningfully involved a large number of Americans overseas long before and long after their military and political engagement.

But in other respects studies have remained wedded to more traditional perspectives. Above all, historians of foreign relations continue to understand US humanitarianism almost exclusively in the light of US strategic interests. The postwar humanitarian commitment of both the USA's private and semi-official organizations, they hold, was to spur reform along US lines and project an image of an economically potent, culturally progressive and efficient American nation, both to smooth US economic expansion and impede the spread of Bolshevism. ¹¹ In contrast to the richness of studies on US objectives, scarce attention has been paid to recipient attitudes and ambitions. ¹² Those few scholars that have studied aid recipients have tended to emphasize the point that their suffering is frequently appropriated and at times misrepresented by foreign fundraisers, that foreign aid creates patterns of dependency and obligation, that it even deprives recipients of their agency. ¹³ Ironically, by exposing this colonial and paternalistic character of humanitarian ‘empires’ such studies have arguably reinforced common readings of aid recipients as passive beneficiaries of foreign magnanimity. Whereas ‘Americanization’ more generally has long since been rethought as a two-way process of adaption, rejection and appropriation, the USA’s humanitarian expansion is hardly ever critically explored from the ‘receiving end’.

In contrast, this article illustrates how a recipient nation pursued its very own interests in the context of the USA's emerging global humanitarian enterprise. ¹⁴ It shows how German official and private groups approached US aid almost exclusively in light of their own ambitions and attempted to turn Germany's relative economic weakness into a foreign policy asset. This said, it might be argued that Germany as a major industrial nation is not representative of our common (contemporary) expectations of an aid recipient. But at least in the context of the early 1920s, its case appears hardly exceptional. After the war, the children of many a European (great) power became beneficiaries of US charity. What distinguished the German case was not its industrial development, but its recent enemy status, its dramatic loss of international influence and the central role it accorded the US in its economic reconstruction. It was exactly this unique situation, which brought the potential political promises (and the drawbacks) of US aid into sharp relief. For scholars of humanitarianism and foreign relations alike, the German case might thus prove particularly instructive. Going back to the armistice, the article traces the driving forces behind German humanitarian appeals and American reactions. It explains how and why child distress remained relevant to Weimar's attempts to revise the peace treaty, explores its promises and limitations in the ongoing Franco-German battle over reparations and interprets the strategy's ultimate demise after 1923.

German attempts to bring civilian suffering to US attention go back to the early hours of the armistice. Confronted with the unexpected reality that the naval blockade had been left in place at Compiegne, it was still on 11 November that German foreign secretary Wilhelm Solf publicly implored President Wilson to alleviate the armistice terms and loosen the blockade to avoid ‘the starvation of millions of men, women and children’. ¹⁵ In the coming weeks and months his comparatively sober official appeal was backed and elaborated on by German women, churchmen, social reformers and doctors, which called on US civil society to help lift the blockade. In open letters, scientific treatises, reports and articles, a host of non-governmental groups sought to alert an international audience to the severe deprivation the German people had long suffered – and was still suffering – due to the Allied ‘hunger blockade’. 760 000 Germans, mostly children, women and elderly, they claimed, had already succumbed to the consequences of malnourishment. No country had suffered more during the war than Germany. ¹⁶

From the very first, these humanitarian appeals had a strong political dimension. While they were to appear a spontaneous outcry of the German people they received the systematic support of German officials. The Foreign Ministry's propaganda division, in particular, carefully collected, translated and distributed these private appeals, commissioned appropriate illustrations and prompted medical reports on the blockade's civilian death toll. ¹⁷ These official efforts clearly aimed to improve the precarious food situation in Germany for both social and (shortly after the revolution) political reasons. But historians have long recognized that they also served distinct foreign policy objectives. By raising the spectre of Bolshevism and starvation the German government hoped to divide the Allies on their German policy and remove a naval blockade, which had primarily been left intact to force Germany to accept the coming peace terms. ¹⁸

But German humanitarian appeals clearly aimed beyond these immediate, blockade-related objectives. In fact, they have to be understood as part of a much longer-standing propaganda war, which Germany had been fighting – and losing – against Allied atrocity propaganda since August of 1914. Had German propagandists so far found few effective means to counter the extremely negative international impact of the ‘rape of Belgium’, German defeat, ironically, inspired optimism among them. ¹⁹ The Allied victory, the Foreign Ministry's propaganda division reported on 2 December, had for the first time created ‘a sort of compassion and sympathy’ for Germany, which could be used to improve its battered image. It was especially ‘the great suffering of the [German] people and its tragic fate’ that promised, ‘when presented in the right kind of way… to lead to a sea change of world opinion.’ ²⁰ By emphasizing German suffering and Allied ‘frightfulness’ – an exact inversion of wartime presentations – German propagandists thus hoped to soften international judgments on Germany in the lead up to the peace conference.

But even if this sort of agitation followed the established patterns of atrocity propaganda, we have to acknowledge that it was a radical departure from Germany's own wartime strategies. Although scarcity had been a dominating feature of the German home front experience, the military censors had all through the war suppressed any mention of civilian suffering, which they feared would undermine public morale, serve to strengthen British commitment to the blockade and considered altogether incompatible with their own notions of an assertive national representation. Instead, they had kept civilian mortality figures secret and boldly – even in the hunger winter of 1916–17 – asserted the well-being of the German people to the outside world. ²¹ But once the military censors had left their posts in late 1918, the wisdom of their ‘propaganda of strength’ came under strong attack. A number of prominent politicians and diplomats, including Matthias Erzberger, a Centre Party politician and early leader of wartime propaganda operations, began to emphasize the lack of appeals to pity as the central shortcoming of German wartime propaganda. Military censorship, Erzberger believed, had forced German propagandists to forfeit, ‘one of the mightiest [propaganda] factors: the warming pity with a starving, heavily suffering people’ while the Entente’s more skilful propagandists had successfully dehumanized the German enemy by exactly those means. ²² It was in response to wartime failures, that German propagandists now began to discover and adopt the persuasive power of pity.

While the agitation against the ‘hunger blockade’ is still comparatively well-known, historians have so far ignored that the major notion behind this incipient ‘diplomacy of pity’, the idea that the German civilian plight was a topic especially suited to win foreign sympathies, remained valid even, and especially, after Versailles. The harsh conditions of the peace and their moral justification roused German indignation. As soon as the treaty had been signed, the question of how to revise its terms assumed centre stage in German official and public discussion. In this context, policy makers and publicists alike recognized the importance of international sentiments and urged the adoption of more effective propaganda techniques as a substitute for the loss of traditional means of power and influence. ²³ Whereas other countries quickly dismantled their wartime communication structures, the German propaganda landscape remained largely intact, and was soon invigorated by a wide array of private and semi-official groups committed to convincing the world of the unjust and untenable nature of the peace treaty. ²⁴

In this drive to bring the perceived injustice of Versailles to the attention of the world, representations of childhood suffering continued to be accorded a prominent place. Indeed, German publicity materials, authored by churchmen, social reformers and doctors, shifted their focus from the effects of the blockade to those of the peace treaty. While the blockade continued to be cited as the root cause of German child distress, the loss of arable land in the East, the occupation costs and the burden of reparations were charged with prolonging the plight of German children (see Figure 1). Few of the publicity materials were as blunt as the one brochure titled Wie wir verhungern. Deutsches Familienelend unter dem Versailler Vertrag [How we are Starving. German Family Distress under the Versailles Treaty] but all of them strongly underlined that an improvement of child health was contingent on a revision of the peace terms. ²⁵ In medical reports, statistics, images and personal interest stories the malnourished bodies of German children were presented as irrefutable evidence of the untenable nature of the peace. In part to sustain their revisionist conclusions these materials not only exaggerated German suffering vis-a-vis other European countries but reduced German problems entirely to external causes. ²⁶ Within about a year of Versailles, Germany’s humanitarian narrative had moved from an indictment of the ‘hunger blockade’ to an indictment of the ‘hunger peace’. ²⁷

It was not wartime lessons alone that drove Germans to emphasize the theme of childhood suffering in their revisionist politics. The problem was that few of the symbols and categories used domestically to express the injustice of the peace moved foreign audiences. Clearly, the occupation of the Rhineland, the ‘bleeding borders’ in the East, even the ‘war guilt’ question held very limited emotive appeal to the outside world. In contrast, children as the ‘innocent victims par excellence’ (Cabanes) matched not only German self-interpretations as a victimized nation, but seemed to resonate with audiences worldwide. ²⁸ Indeed, though German armistice appeals had had no apparent effect on the peace terms, German officials had during the spring of 1919 registered (and sought to further) an increasing activism of humanitarian groups in neutral and even belligerent countries on behalf of ‘enemy children’. ²⁹ At a time when the assumption of German responsibility for the war was near universal, the innocent suffering of German children alone appeared able to evoke recognition and concern for the precarious German situation. ³⁰ Given the absence of other potent symbols of German victimization, the visible plight of the children seemed especially suited to communicate German demands for a revision of Versailles. ³¹

Even after the peace, the Foreign Ministry thus showed a strong interest in the topic of child distress and continued to subsidize, translate and distribute brochures, to fund lecture trips abroad and even to provide instructions on what, or what not, foreign visitors were to be made to see. ³² But to imagine the campaign – either before or after the peace – predominantly as a governmentally planned and executed propaganda scheme is to miss the complexity of motivations that informed it. For the most part, the role of the government was limited to supporting a grassroots campaign driven by charitable, medical and reform circles, whose primary concern was not foreign policy, but child health. ³³

Indeed, to stress that representations of child suffering were assigned a primarily political function by the German Foreign Ministry is not to doubt its reality. German distress was never a mere propaganda fabrication as many outside of Germany believed. ³⁴ Based on anthropometric data, recent scholarship has confirmed the marked impact of the blockade on German public health, particularly on poor, urban children, whose families tended to receive only basic rations and had little access to black market goods or farm supplies. ³⁵ After the war, German children were on average three to five centimetres shorter than their pre-war peers and postwar economic dislocation, inflation and overtaxed social budgets impeded their fast recovery. ³⁶ There is no indication that the international appeals by German welfare workers, churchmen and doctors were not primarily made to remedy the suffering they witnessed all around them and which seemed all the more dramatic after decades of hard-won improvements in child health.

And yet, when the reality of suffering is accounted for, it remains true that these bourgeois men and women shared in the widespread revisionist consensus of their time. Believing that the international reluctance to revise the treaty or aid in German reconstruction stemmed in part from an honest misperception of German conditions abroad, they did everything in their power to paint the German situation in bleak, often overly bleak, colours. ³⁷ Even if their priorities differed from those of German foreign policy makers, they did share in the hope that increased international awareness of German distress could ‘bring the Allies to their senses’. ³⁸ Humanitarian appeals conveyed actual suffering just as they were harnessed for Weimar's revisionist politics.

This ‘diplomacy of pity’ seemed nowhere more promising than in the powerful and prosperous United States of America. As the Allied creditor, its engagement was considered crucial to any meaningful adjustment of the peace terms, especially the yet to be settled reparations payments. With their interest in a stable and prosperous Europe, US diplomats and financiers, it was hoped, would not only check the substantial demands made on Germany by the USA's debtors, particularly France, but also advance the loans necessary for Germany's economic recovery. It was with US support that Germany hoped to restore its great power status.

Almost from the beginning US public opinion was identified as a major stumbling block to US engagement. Though attitudes towards Germany had diversified since the armistice, wartime dislike and distrust remained strong among a considerable part of the US public. German armistice appeals, for example, had only given rise to a bitter discussion over ‘feeding the enemy’. Although foodstuffs were eventually sold to Germany, depictions of German suffering were routinely dismissed as yet another shameless propaganda fabrication in order to ‘play for [US] sympathy’ and win an easy peace (see Figure 2). ³⁹ With Germany seen as a cause, not a victim of European conditions, most Americans were not, and would never become, inclined to pity Germany. Even after the peace, a considerable part of the American public either maintained their wartime loyalties to the Allies or, disillusioned with European power politics, retreated from foreign affairs altogether. ⁴⁰ The German fate, it seemed, hinged on convincing an apathetic and hostile US public that the peace was both unjust and untenable and, even more difficult, that the USA ought to involve itself in its revision.

To understand the particular promise held by humanitarian appeals, in spite of the USA’s discouraging armistice response, we have to consider the extremely limited German opportunities to influence the US public on these questions. For years after the war German statements were almost invariably dismissed as ‘German propaganda’ and even the most harmless cultural efforts to reach out to German-Americans were sure to unleash anti-German diatribes and nativist attacks on an already browbeaten ethnic group. ⁴¹ That the state of war between the two countries was not officially terminated until late 1921, three years after the armistice, also deferred the re-establishment of normal diplomatic, trade, cultural and personal relations, which would have provided Germany with a measure of physical and emotional access to the US public.

Against the backdrop of these constraints, US humanitarian concerns seemed a distinct window of opportunity. With the end of the war, Americans entered a period of unprecedented humanitarian engagement and once the peace treaty had been signed in Paris, a diverse set of ethnic, pacifist and liberal American groups began to advocate aid also to the former enemy. The large number of Americans of German birth or descent clearly led the way. Driven by the desire to help friends and family overseas and express continued concern for the defeated fatherland, relief work became the central ethnic occupation of the post-war period. ⁴² But interest and concern for German children soon widened to pacifist and liberal circles. By August 1919, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker relief organization, had already set up a small German child-feeding program, which grew – with financial support of Herbert Hoover – into one of the largest child aid programs in postwar Europe. ⁴³ Compared to the personal attachments driving German–American relief work, the AFSC and like-minded progressive and pacifist circles approached the German situation from a humanitarian and peace-building perspective. Like similar groups in Sweden or Great Britain, they promoted an ‘image of the universal child’, which deserved US sympathy and support irrespective of its race, creed, nationality or contemporary politics. ⁴⁴ They saw in German relief a promising peace-building project and an important opportunity for post-war reconciliation. By nurturing the ‘enemy children’ and by communicating the German situation to a larger US public they hoped to pave the way for renewed international understanding. ⁴⁵ American ‘relief czar’ Herbert Hoover, for his part, coupled such humanitarian sentiments with a pragmatic counterrevolutionary agenda. Convinced that ‘hunger breads Bolshevism’, he had already during the armistice advocated food sales to Germany and now used US aid to stabilize and pacify Central Europe while cultivating European regard for a benevolent and efficient USA. ⁴⁶ Driven by such different (at times conflicting) motivations, the US child-feeding program in Germany was by the summer of 1921 feeding more than one million German children. Years before diplomatic relations between the two countries were ever re-established, child relief had meaningfully involved a significant number of Americans with postwar Germany.

German officials and private groups strongly welcomed this unprecedented US humanitarian engagement for both its anticipated social and political impact. Apart from its amelioration of prevalent conditions, they saw in ensuing transatlantic relief structures a promising way to revive pre-war ethnic and progressive networks and to communicate the German situation to the US public without being dismissed as ‘German propaganda’. As far as German revisionist ambitions were concerned, the distinct value of US humanitarian relief lay in the fact that Americans deemed it a ‘non-political’ activity. This seemed especially important with regard to German-Americans, whose at least emotional connection to the ‘fatherland’ German policy makers and semi-official groups aimed to maintain even in a nativist climate. Whereas political agitation among German-Americans was sure to arouse the suspicions of 100 per cent Americans, humanitarian activities were usually considered a permissible ethnic concern. ⁴⁷ Even German diplomats in the United States of America, ever cautious about ethnic mobilization in the 1920s, regarded the publicity of child suffering an especially inconspicuous and effective theme to keep alive German-American indignation against Versailles without appearing to meddle in US affairs. ⁴⁸ The fact that the German Red Cross had by 1921 established contacts with, and forwarded its publications to, over 300 German-American relief committees speaks clearly to the success of the strategy.

At the same time America’s humanitarian concern afforded a chance to activate the sympathies of politically more influential ‘Anglo-Americans’, who were believed to be particularly susceptible to sentimental appeals, especially when pertaining to children. ⁴⁹ In this context, it was the substantial engagement of non-ethnic charitable groups, especially the AFSC that made US relief work appear so promising to German officials. With their high credibility, first-hand experience of the German situation, knowledge of American psychology and recourse to a rapidly professionalizing fundraising and publicity apparatus they alone seemed able to organize broad support among US public otherwise doubtful as to the veracity of German suffering. From a political standpoint, concluded thus one German diplomat in 1920, the ‘primary value’ of relief work lay in its ‘great propagandistic usefulness’, in the fact that it ‘enlightens [wide circles] about the true distress in Germany through neutral countries themselves’. ⁵⁰ While it is clear that US charitable groups acted according to their own interests, Germans rightly identified (and cultivated) them as the one segment of US society both willing and able to raise awareness and sympathy for Germany’s post-war problem. Given their strongly pacifist and ethnic motivations these significant mulitiplier groups could also be expected to continue their work even once German conditions had (from a detached scientific standpoint) significantly improved. ⁵¹ Profoundly isolated and convinced that the USA's hostile opinion constrained US engagement, German officials saw in US relief work a promising way to relay the politically desirable image of a destitute, victimized Germany across the Atlantic. US humanitarianism, it turned out, could be of strategic value to both US and German foreign policy interests.

In the United States of America, German revisionist politics played out primarily against competing French interests. Whereas Berlin sought to convince Americans of the untenable nature of the peace treaty and pry them loose from wartime moral alliances, Paris aimed to maintain these very bonds, secure American commitment to the treaty's financial and security arrangements and avoid collection of its $3 billion war debt. ⁵² After early 1920, the Franco-German conflict crystallized in the struggle over reparations, whose bitterness derived from its far-reaching social and political implications. For France, which had borne the brunt of wartime devastation, German reparations payments were first and foremost a question of how to cover its staggering budget deficits, service its wartime debt, pay pensions and rebuild its destroyed provinces. But reparations were, too, about power and influence in Europe. Only if France succeeded in slowing Germany's economic recovery by extracting considerable payments, could it hope to maintain its hard-won European predominance and, not the least, its security against a revengeful and demographically advantaged neighbour. ⁵³ Given the high stakes on both sides, and the central role accorded to the United States of America, the early 1920s witnessed a fierce Franco–German competition for US sentiments and support.

As the reparations question became acute after the spring of 1920, both pro-French and pro-German groups used the matter of economic devastation to back their claims to US capital and goodwill. Because the question was whether, as the French claimed, Germany was simply unwilling to meet her justly accrued responsibilities to a deserving French nation or whether, as Germans claimed, she was simply unable to in the face of her own postwar economic problems, the issue of public health and hardship was imbued with an immediate political importance. In this context, France relied strongly on the visible signs of destruction in its Northern provinces and pointed to the intactness of German lands to jockey for a more lenient treatment of its war debt and a determined response to German recalcitrance in the reparations question. German supporters, in turn, increasingly countered with an emphasis on German child distress. Though Germany's industry and lands were left unscarred by the war, they argued, Germany had suffered the violation of a much more vital part of its national life, its children. While throngs of US visitors to France were systematically taken to see destroyed villages presented as evidence of German ruthlessness, the growing number of US visitors to German cities were equally strategically taken to see undernourished children at ‘places of misery’ (proletarian apartments, orphanages and tuberculosis wards) presented as evidence of the untenable nature of the peace treaty and the impoverished state of the nation. ⁵⁴ As one German Red Cross pamphlet summed up German arguments: ‘The bodies and minds of our children are our destroyed provinces’. ⁵⁵

Especially in the hand of German-Americans, depictions of German distress soon advanced from a competition of victimhood towards a moral indictment of France. German-American editors routinely presented the unaccommodating French reparations policy as a concerted hunger war against women and children bent on the extermination of one third of the German population. ⁵⁶ Given such abrasive attacks, it is not surprising that the publicity of the German plight increasingly coalesced with the incipient Black Horror agitation in the summer of 1920. Ray Beveridge, for example, an American actress-turned-propagandist and one of the most notorious ‘Black Horror’ activists, launched her postwar career speaking on behalf of suffering German children. One of the most successful props used in her public speeches was an image of a motherly Beveridge with a well-fed interracial toddler of normal weight (allegedly the product of the ‘black horror’) and a malnourished, 6-year old white German child of stunted growth, who, shockingly, seemed to be of roughly the same height (see Figure 3). Distributed as a picture postcard in the United States of America with an ‘appeal to humanity’, this striking juxtaposition combined the emotive factors of both campaigns and offered a master narrative of German victimhood and French aggression. ⁵⁷ The argumentative shift from the blockade to the peace treaty thus dovetailed with a determined propaganda move, which promoted anti-French rather than anti-British sentiments in the USA.

French and Francophile groups soon responded in kind. One French cartoon, reprinted in the Literary Digest, held that Germany’s ‘whines and wails’ were but a lie to evade its just responsibilities (see Figure 4), that there was no distress in Germany and outside help would be unnecessary if its rich just contributed their fair share. French observers were quoted as saying that ‘German children… have not suffered nearly so much as have the French children in the devastated regions’. ⁵⁸ Just as German relief committees used their work to make larger political points, heiress Anne Morgan’s American Committee for Devastated France used its wide-ranging fundraising operations to remind Americans of French sacrifices for the common cause and sustain indignation against an unrepentant Germany out to cheat France of its well-deserved fruits of victory. ⁵⁹ In this way, both sides used their humanitarian narratives to keep the war's social cost and sacrifices before US eyes and to reduce the opaque, highly complex reparations negotiations to their most basic, emotional arguments: that France's long suffering entitled it to reparations, which a relatively prosperous Germany was simply unwilling to pay; and that Germany's own dire economic situation kept it from paying reparations, which France insisted on to ruin it. After mid-1920, championed by a range of US sympathizers, the distress of German and French children had clearly emerged as one theatre of the Franco–German ‘struggle for the affections of America’ (Young). ⁶⁰

In this ongoing ‘struggle’, Germany seemed to be gaining ground on the French. By late 1920, German-American relief drives were underway across the USA, and the AFSC credibly and sympathetically testified to German distress in a wide variety of US media outlets. In late 1920 it even persuaded Herbert Hoover to include German children in the largest postwar fundraising drive, the European Relief Council (Hoover-Drive) thus providing their plight with official recognition and publicity alongside other European children, including those of Northern France. ⁶¹ While scholars have identified these developments as a distinct step towards the normalization of US sentiments, there is little evidence that they reflected widespread sympathy for Germany. ⁶² Hostility and suspicion towards Germany, even German children, remained manifest throughout the fundraising drive. ⁶³ Rather, the inclusion of German children indicates the extent to which France had by early 1921 lost its privileged wartime position in US affections. To be sure, this transatlantic estrangement owed not to abrasive German attacks, but to profound differences of interest that came to the fore in the unpleasant debates over the repayment of France's staggering war debt, its military sanctioning policies and the matter of disarmament. As the one country interested in a strict enforcement of the peace treaty, the wartime image of ‘poor little France’ slowly gave way to that of a European troublemaker. ⁶⁴ It was this loosening of wartime emotional alliances that provided wider acceptance for the ideas of those humanitarian groups that had long advocated a universal obligation to the welfare of children, including those of the recent enemy. As such, US aid to Germany in 1921 reflected a wider transnational development towards a recognition and definition of children's humanitarian rights, not pro-German sympathies. ⁶⁵

Quite on the contrary, while the drive was satisfactory from a child-feeding perspective, Germany’s ‘diplomacy of pity’ had by 1921 clearly failed to achieve its strategic, revisionist goals. Even after years of publicity on German conditions most Americans had neither accepted the conclusion of German victimhood nor the need for revision, let alone French responsibility for German problems. ⁶⁶ Even among those that did, namely German-Americans, the mobilization for German distress had not borne tangible political results. While their relief work was indeed crucial to the modest reconstitution of their defunct institutional life, German-Americans ultimately remained too marginalized, too cautious and too divided to use this – or any other issue – for united action at the ballot box. ⁶⁷ Instead, the crudely revisionist, exaggerated claims of some German-American relief bodies were increasingly perceived as detrimental to winning Anglo-American support. Worst of all, the United States of America seemed to have moved no closer to involvement in European problems. Just on the heels of the Hoover-Drive, the incoming Harding administration rejected a desperate German plea for mediation in the reparations questions and in signing a separate peace with Germany a few months later, it characteristically frustrated both French and German hopes by securing for itself all the rights of the Versailles Treaty, while rejecting its international obligations. ⁶⁸ For all their humanitarian concern, Americans appeared politically more withdrawn from Europe than ever before. By mid-1921, the limitations of the ‘diplomacy of pity’ had become apparent.

But it was not only the strategy's limited political success (or the improvement of German child health) that would lead German officials in particular to de-emphasize child distress after 1921. At least since late 1920 German diplomats had also begun to notice the disconcerting side effects of international benevolence. In particular, they witnessed an alarming rise in individual German collectors grazing foreign lands for donations to inflation-ridden institutions. Apparently attracted by the wide publicity given to foreign benevolence, their open ‘begging’ not only impaired desirable indigenous relief efforts but appeared to violate even the most basic demands of national dignity. There was, as German diplomats realized, a very thin line between aid and alms. As a humiliated, defeated nation, Germany was keen to win the sympathy of the world, but it certainly did not want to appear to beg for the charity of its erstwhile enemies. ⁶⁹ As ‘begging’ became an ever more prominent, essentially uncontrollable problem, the propaganda value of German misery began to pale against the need to re-establish German prestige overseas.

As a consequence, the German Foreign Ministry began to turn its attention to propaganda ventures more suited to rouse Americans to action. By mid-1921, the agitation against the ‘Black Horror’ and against German war guilt already eclipsed that of the German plight, because they offered, respectively, a more sensational indictment of French practices and a more fundamental critique of the peace treaty. The establishment of official relations at the same time also provided greater regular access to US elites. With the appointment of the businessman Otto Wiedfeldt as first postwar ambassador to Washington in April 1922, German policy shifted markedly from cultivating the US public towards getting in touch with US businessmen and financiers. For a while, appeals to emotions declined noticeably in favour of appeals to economic self-interest. ⁷⁰

It was only the dual crisis of 1923 – the Ruhr occupation and the meltdown of German currency – that would revive the ‘diplomacy of pity’ once more. Just days after the French occupied the Ruhr on 11 January in response to German reparations payment defaults, the German embassy in Washington mobilized German-Americans for special Ruhr collections ⁷¹ and by late summer it had successfully organized what was easily the most comprehensive German propaganda campaign in the postwar era: a large-scale, US-wide fundraising drive on behalf of German children.

From the beginning, the renewed publicity on German child distress was part of the intense propaganda war that accompanied German passive resistance in the Ruhr. With the economic odds stacked against it, Berlin was determined to make the very most of this act of ‘French aggression’ and to score a major moral victory in the court of world opinion. ⁷² In the United States of America, an emphasis on French brutality and the detrimental economic impact of French policy was hoped to bring about a decisive change in public sentiment, which would finally permit the US administration to get involved in the reparations question. ⁷³ In this context, the importance of emotional appeals was once more recognized. Already in late October 1922, mounting tensions over reparations had led the German embassy in Washington to advise Berlin to once more highlight German distress under the peace treaty in order to make a strong emotional appeal to the American people. ‘Solely in this way’, the embassy concluded, ‘will public opinion retain a mood, which feels pity for the suffering of Germany and will not resist an American involvement in European reconstruction. And on the mood of public opinion over here everything depends’. ⁷⁴

Yet, no matter how politically expedient such emotional appeals seemed, apprehensions about the strategy's implications for German prestige remained pronounced. German officials, in particular, remained cautious about publicizing German suffering beyond German-friendly circles as long as other means of influencing the US public were still available. ⁷⁵ It was primarily the weight of Germany’s increasingly desperate political and social conditions that overrode their concerns by July of 1923. With a concrete plan for European reconstruction still wanting, German inflation skyrocketing, passive resistance on the brink of collapse, and the US public – despite months of German agitation – mostly apathetic to the German fate, a large-scale relief campaign emerged as the only viable option to create some measure of sympathy and support for the German situation. ⁷⁶ In line with a German cabinet meeting on 15 August, which highlighted the imminent breakdown of passive resistance, the Wilhelmstrasse directly instructed the German ambassador to organize a US relief campaign. ⁷⁷ It was only at this moment of dramatically restricted room of manoeuvre that after years of informal, if state aided agitation, the ‘diplomacy of pity’ emerged as a governmentally driven strategy.

But in organizing a large-scale US relief campaign for Germany, German officials could avail themselves of the informal, transnational infrastructures grown through years of US relief work. German-American networks were easily activated, but it was the participation of US Quakers, as an impartial, trustworthy US group, that Germans deemed crucial to secure a larger public impact of the campaign. In several meetings in Philadelphia, the German ambassador appealed directly to the Quakers to lend their support to the campaign. Though they were clearly aware of the more political designs pursued by the German government they proved at this point, after years of German relief work, too emotionally invested in the German fate – and too enthusiastic about the pacifist project of passive resistance – to turn down the ambassador's plea for help. ⁷⁸ Their positive response, in marked contrast to the American Red Cross, illustrates the extent to which humanitarian interventions depend not solely on an assessment of objective need, but sympathies and emotional investments. ⁷⁹ It was with the backing of the AFSC that General Henry T. Allen, the late commander of the US troops in the Rhineland, was persuaded to lead the large fundraising drive on behalf of German children. As an ‘Anglo-American’ with extensive European experience, unassailable reputation and proven patriotism, Allen's leadership would make the drive less susceptible to accusations of pro-German agitation and was, as Germans well realized, its single greatest asset.

Though German interests, funds and publicity materials (see Figure 5) would play a determining role in the inauguration of the fundraising campaign, German influence was systematically obscured and the drive passed off as an entirely American endeavour. ⁸⁰ Supporters of the campaign would frequently note that they had not ‘one drop of German blood in [their] veins’ and German names were purposefully absent from the national committee in order to deflect accusations of pro-German agitation and secure the disinterested appearance that humanitarian giving (and successful propaganda) depends on. That this strategy proved wise can be seen from the considerable opposition General Allen faced during the fall of 1923 in raising a representative national board among Americans still doubtful as to the sincerity of Germany’s hardship and her moral entitlement to US help. In the context of the Ruhr struggle many potential participants also considered a campaign for German children ‘just at this moment’ not a disinterested humanitarian act but a public declaration of sympathy for the German side, which they were not prepared to take. ⁸¹

It was for this reason, too, that American officials hesitated to lend even nominal support. In the Ruhr crisis of 1923 Washington had taken a decidedly neutral position and indulged in a policy of ‘calculated aloofness’. ⁸² Until a promising and concrete plan for European stabilization had been proposed the Harding and (from August 1923) the Coolidge administration cultivated an appearance of impartiality and remained officially inactive. It was only in early October, with passive resistance abandoned and Germany's political and economic breakdown ever more apparent, that the Coolidge administration began to pursue the set-up of an expert committee with US participation to settle the reparations question. Just as the relief campaign began in October and November, Washington strove to compel France to accept this solution by both concessions and (financial) pressures, leading to an agreement on 30 November. ⁸³ In this critical period any official support of a pro-German endeavour, which could have been interpreted as a derision of French occupation policy, must have appeared unwise. ⁸⁴ President Coolidge and members of his administration privately expressed their sympathies with the cause but felt that any official support could be misjudged interference in Franco-German affairs. ⁸⁵

And yet, the impressive range of names eventually assembled on the American Committee for the Relief of German Children (Allen-Drive) signalled a clear change in US sentiment towards the European crisis. By November 1923, the national committee featured more than one hundred leading men of business, finance, science and politics, including the later architects of the Dawes-Plan: Owen D. Young and Charles G. Dawes. Most of these men routinely served on relief boards and the political significance of their participation ought not to be overstated. But as much of General Allen’s correspondence indicates, joining or endorsing the German fundraising campaign in 1923 was indeed considered a political statement. This said, many of them participated not out of any special sympathy for Germany, but an increasingly widespread concern over the European impasse, its implications for world prosperity and a recognition of American stakes in European reconstruction. ⁸⁶ US businessmen, like German officials, probably understood a large fundraising campaign as a particularly apt way to generate public interest in German conditions and moral momentum for the USA's financial intervention. This at least was how General Allen himself understood his involvement in the campaign. As he explained to the US Secretary of State in August of 1923, he wanted to support the government in ending ‘the present great European Struggle. First, by giving publicity… to the present menace to Western civilization and then to insist that American prestige and ingenuity backed up by world obligation and world welfare should and could successfully act.’ ⁸⁷ Clearly, a campaign for German children offered salient opportunities to invoke both US ability and its moral responsibility to mitigate the European crisis. As the campaign unfolded across the United States of America from November 1923 to May 1924 – raising more than three million dollars – US churches, clubs and businessmen did not tire of casting Germany as a stage for US ingenuity, efficiency and common sense in the field of relief and beyond. ⁸⁸

As far as Germany was concerned, the US campaign came not a moment too soon. By late autumn, conditions had indeed become precarious. To be sure, it was not the Ruhr occupation itself, the overburdening with reparations or even the ‘sadistic French lust for destruction’, as Germans claimed, but a longer-standing inflation worsened by financing passive resistance that led to Germany’s fiscal and economic meltdown. ⁸⁹ Because farmers were no longer willing to sell for worthless currency, the food distribution was breaking down at a time of increasing un- and underemployment. In this state of affairs foreign aid became, for the first time since the armistice, truly pivotal. By late October, the Ministry of the Interior admitted that inadequate funds for welfare expenditures gave foreign charitable aid a ‘determining importance’ in warding off a ‘starvation catastrophe’. ⁹⁰ Shortly thereafter Germany issued an official appeal to the charitable organizations of the world. For all its foreign policy potential, German destitution remained a strong reason, not a mere pretence for German appeals.

But even in these months of severe financial exasperation and political disintegration, foreign affairs were never just secondary. In a circular to all German ministers, foreign minister Stresemann illustrated the political function still assigned to foreign aid. Reminding his colleagues that international support was only useful if everything possible was being done to alleviate the distress in Germany itself and if these German measures were publicized abroad, he urged their cooperation and made it clear that:

this aid program – even if its aim is primarily material help and certainly every deliberate political semblance will have to be avoided – will inevitably also have a strong political side effect, insofar as it will again draw the attention of the entire world to the untenable situation brought upon Germany by the reparations burden and the French course of action. A failure of the relief program would thus also mean a foreign policy failure. ⁹¹

Political enthusiasm for the fundraising campaign proved, however, short-lived. Already by early 1924, German officials, first among them the German ambassador to Washington, distanced themselves from the ‘diplomacy of pity’, which they had once seen as a viable option. Doubtlessly, ambassador Wiedfeldt had taken a very strong interest in the child-feeding campaign from its inception. Though he cautioned Berlin not to expect too much, he had recognized a fundraising drive as the only, if short-term, way to generate sympathies for Germany in 1923, had attended a barrage of meetings on its organization and regularly reported on its development to Berlin. ⁹² When administrative funds to commence the relief drive had seemed to be lacking, the German embassy had immediately forwarded US$8000 for this purpose. ⁹³ Yet just a few months later, Wiedfeldt’s disenchantment with the idea was evident and deserves some attention as it illustrates the general limitations of pity as a foreign relations tool.

Ambassador Wiedfeldt’s disenchantment surely owed much to his insight that the campaign had not won public sympathies as expected. Though it was remarkably successful in generating publicity on Germany and winning the support of respectable, mainstream US groups, there was once again little indication that the US public had come to favour the German position by way of humanitarian appeals, even if observers noted that decidedly anti-French sentiments unfolded throughout. ⁹⁴ Indeed, for all the experts, statistics and credible advocates the campaign eventually mustered, US suspicions about a ‘feigned tragedy’, the idea that German destitution was only an act of misery to win the sympathies of the world, never subsided. ⁹⁵ Quite on the contrary, in the light of the US relief campaign, the deliberate nature of German inflation, the flight of capital abroad, German militarism, nationalism and antisemitism (of which there was ample evidence in the months of the Hitler Putsch), its numerous diplomatic blunders and above all else, the lavish spending of wealthy Germans all received heightened critical attention in the US press. ⁹⁶ Though the German government took strong measures to sustain its carefully constructed image of destitution, obvious displays of German wealth and political intransigence continued to feed US distrust and dislike. Being the object of widespread charity, German diplomats soon learned, placed them in a position of obligation, where the otherwise common behaviour of the German government and people was invariably judged in light of the poverty and humble gratitude expected of an aid recipient.

Indeed, Wiedfeldt’s frustration stemmed in large part from the more fundamental dilemma of humanitarian aid based on unequal donor-recipient relations. For all their couching in terms of peace and reconciliation these relations reflect a pronounced power asymmetry, which constant appeals to charity may cement and perpetuate. Some scholars have even contended that foreign aid in general is a form of ‘symbolic domination’ by which unequal power structures are affirmed. ⁹⁷ Hence German diplomats’ pronounced concern over ‘begging’ Germans and their slow but certain consternation at the very idea of foreign relief. ⁹⁸ By early 1924 the attempt to gain short-term charity and sympathy had begun to conflict with the long-term goal of establishing a renewed cooperation on an equal footing.

Moreover, while German distress served to highlight her inability to pay reparations and might have secured some international pity, it also had the detrimental effect of downplaying German assets needed to attract foreign loans. On a fact-finding mission to Berlin for the Allen-Drive, an American professor had in December of 1923 already noticed the conflicting agendas of his informants with regard to charity and loans. While the representatives of the German Ministry of Nutrition and Agriculture portrayed the situation as entirely hopeless, the German currency commissioner – more interested in loans than charity – portrayed Germany’s problems as fleeting and belaboured its promising prospects. ⁹⁹ As a businessman, ambassador Wiedfeldt was highly sceptical of overemphasizing German despair because it devalued Germany's still existing economic assets and undermined the possibility of an international loan. ¹⁰⁰ As he summed up the inherent problem of charity in both its political and economic dimensions: ‘an American who now gives 20 dollars to a begging German, will not sit down at the negotiation table an hour later with another German to do business as equals’. ¹⁰¹

The official appointment of the Dawes Reparations Committee in December 1923 only hastened this retreat from the ‘diplomacy of pity’. As US engagement had finally been secured the child-feeding campaign began to be perceived as superfluous, even harmful to German interests. With the progression of the committee’s work, German efforts to disassociate from the US fundraising drive became ever more evident. When the US Secretary of State visited Germany in the context of the London reparations conference in the summer of 1924, ambassador Wiedfeldt only suggested some official words of praise for General Allen. Other than that, the German government was to strongly emphasize its own embarrassment about the fundraising efforts in the United States of America and express its hope in Germany's economic recovery so that all charity could cease once and for all. ¹⁰² Herewith, Germany quietly abandoned its ‘diplomacy of pity’ and awaited the ‘dollar sunrise’.

Germans deliberately, if at times reluctantly, publicized the plight of the civilian population to garner US sympathies, to emotionally bolster their revisionist arguments and ultimately to win US engagement in the reparations question. The campaign, pursued from 1918 to 1921 and again in 1923, was neither as long-lived as the ensuing war guilt agitation nor as abrasive as the Black Horror propaganda. But it did constitute a very first attempt to learn from Germany’s botched wartime agitation by adopting the language and imagery of suffering that had previously been successfully used against it. Throughout the early 1920s, US humanitarian concerns provided one of the few available openings to depict German poverty and victimhood in the hope of re-shaping how the US public thought and felt about Germany. This said, there always remained a distinct uneasiness about the implications of this strategy as it bore the danger of further eroding Germany’s already ailing international prestige and restricting its already narrow room for manoeuvre.

Born of the political and economic pressures of the postwar period, the ‘diplomacy of pity’ was dismissed as soon as alternatives became available. While it made German problems re-enter US discussions in a respectable fashion, most Americans never accepted the fate of German children as a legitimate symbol of the German situation. To most of them, Germany simply was no injured innocent, but the potentially strongest continental nation, seen to have begun a devastating war and to have conducted it with unparalleled severity. There is no indication, too, that the campaign ever affected the course of official US action in the reparations question. Indeed, the die for US engagement had been cast prior to the commencement of the relief campaign in late 1923 and was motivated by economic and political, not humanitarian concerns. ¹⁰³

If Germany's propaganda of pity had only a marginal impact on US actions, and if the German case is in some ways exceptional, then the very existence of this strategy still suggests that the history of humanitarian aid needs to be critically re-examined from the receiving end. We need to know much more about the ambitions of those typically cast as passive beneficiaries of US (or western) magnanimity, about the agency recipient countries (or individual recipients) assert and the ways they construct, manipulate and use their humanitarian narrative. The era of the First World War – a ‘transformative moment’ for both international humanitarianism and transatlantic relations – appears particularly promising for a systematic study of the actions and ambitions of different recipient nations. Because the USA’s (official) withdrawal from Europe in the early 1920s coincided with its unprecedented humanitarian engagement, humanitarian aid became a primary means of US involvement in Europe. Under these circumstances, it would be surprising had US aid not become a foreign policy matter in other European countries.

While the German case is in some regards unique – in its postwar isolation and lack of influence, in its recent enmity and in the crucial role the United States of America played in the reparations question – this seems a difference of degree, not of kind. After the war, a large number of European nations were anxious to acquire or retain the interest and sympathy of the world's leading economic power. Certainly, the United States of America could not be ignored by its many European debtors, nor the many more in search of US capital. European diplomatic archives and the records of US humanitarian groups might reveal a wide range of European attitudes towards US aid: distinct ambitions, honest gratitude, caution, resentment or concern about its implications. Whatever they might be, they will tell us much about how Europe sought to come to terms with the onset of the ‘American century’.