3 - CARE Packages - Gifts from Overseas to a Defeated and Debilitated Nation

Summary

[Translated by Eric Weinberger] Germany miscalculated and did so twice. Each time, it challenged first Europe, then the rest of the world; once in 1914 and again in 1939. A devastating defeat in the first war did not deter the Germans from unleashing the second. The question of how to deal with Nazi Germany in the wake of World War II was a source of heated controversy in the United States. Hardliners, conscious of the mass extermination and the disregard of human life shown by the Nazi regime, blamed the German people as a whole for the atrocities. They supported the Morgenthau Plan and came to exert a great deal of influence under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Opposing them were the so-called soft peace boys from the Departments of State and Commerce, especially the brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles. These moderates warned against the adoption of any postwar policy that would single Germany out for punishment, and a range of ecclesiastical organizations sided with them. They feared that such a course would isolate Germany and perpetuate the kind of instability that had unsettled the old world following World War I. In autumn 1945, church welfare organizations founded CARE, and in February 1946 President Harry S. Truman gave permission for humanitarian relief supplies to be shipped to Germany.

CARE packages were probably the most famous packages in history. They would help countless people to survive the worst of the misery left in the wake of the war. For President Truman and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, they embodied a humane expression of international goodwill.