After the war sent CARE packages with coffee and chewing gum. Today, the organization that brought the American Way of Life to Germany, collects donations for emergency relief. Packages no longer exist.
Cocoa and coffee for the opponents of the war? From the American point of view, aid to the defeated Hitler-Germany first of all, absurd. However, as in the Winter of 1945 photos of starving and Displaced people went around the world, the potatoes your family jewelry for a Kilo at the farmers had to trade it in and rolled in the United States, an unprecedented wave of relief.
“The care packages have saved millions of people from starvation,” thanked later German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. “We can’t forget, and we will not forget.”
With the help of the victory makes the United States began more than 70 years ago. The first ship load put on 15. July 1946 in Bremerhaven. A total of ten million packets sent to the American relief organisation CARE between 1949 and 1960, to the destroyed post-war Germany.
A chewing gum makes you sick of it?
CARE was founded in 1945 as a “Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe” in the United States. Meanwhile, the four letters of the global relief organization that has, since 1980, also a branch in Germany, for “Cooperative of Assistance and Relief Everywhere”.
Standing in a queue and hope refuel: Three million Berliners were given after the war care packages
“Many of the care packages came from US-Americans who had relatives in Germany,” recalls CARE spokesman Stefan Brand. “The phrase: ‘I’m putting together a care package for You’, became a winged word for aid deliveries.”
However, Only those who had in post-war Germany, a fixed address, came into the enjoyment of the brown wrapping paper tying up a parcel. In view of the large housing shortage, this was not easy. Many families lived together in a small space. Most of the care packages were, therefore, in Collective and dispensaries distributed.
Actually, for US soldiers
Originally CARE Surplus bought from the US-army and laced it the packages. In the US, this could be against a donation in the amount of $ 15, and then to Europe sent bought. During the Blockade of West Berlin CARE Charter aircraft brought, popularly raisins called bomber, over 200,000 parcels in the city.
Even after the lifting of the Blockade on 12. May 1949, continued the provision of care packages. The air bridge was still up to 30. September 1949 to maintain. CARE continued the aid, and even up to 1960. Almost ten million packets arrived in this period, to Germany, three million of which were in Berlin.
Chewing gum and biscuits, Mickey mouse and Donald Duck: American culture for the Small
Mickey mouse and Donald Duck
The care package a lot of German learned, a Symbol of American culture: the chewing gum. The relief supplies in the German living room not included but just to Eat, therefore, they were also, in particular, children with Mickey mouse and Donald Duck. The cartoon characters adorning the back pages of school notebooks and coloring books.
Foods such as Corned Beef and peanut butter revealed typical American eating habits, and the pieces of clothing – Jeans and sneakers – mediated a touch of the American Way of Life.
Demand on the black market
Care packages not only to alleviate Distress, but also served as valuable objects of Barter on the black market. Even the marriage industry was revived by the auxiliary deliveries – so in any case, the annals of the auxiliary organization’s reports. After that, a woman from France, promised in an ad for her future husband a care package. On the display 2.437 hungry male competitors.
Aid for cyclone victims in Mozambique: Care has distributed tents and basic food in the place Nhamaibwe
Also today, the charity continues to in order to send care packages, but only in a figurative sense. “There is no classic care packages and more,” spokesman Stefan Brand clear. Given the high level of transportation of an individual shipment of packages is no longer cost today. In terms of development policy, it was effective, all of the articles on site or in the Region of purchase.
Assistance by helicopter
The current the help of CARE not to individual families, but to supply the population in the crisis regions, as is currently the case in the cyclone-Idai flooded areas in Mozambique. The supplies of tents, drinking water, and basic food will be jointly coordinated with other aid organizations.
“In the post-war period, there were raisins, bomber, today, there are transport ships and helicopters, food and other essential relief goods to deliver,” says CARE-Nothelferin Ninja Taprogge, which is in Mozambique.
The Zykon in Mozambique and the war in Syria employ the aid organization is currently more than the looking back on the success story of the care packages in the German post-war period. The lesson then is this: Hunger and poverty cannot be delayed.