the US Army in particular was not well pleased, since the cost of feeding millions of hungry Germans fell on its own budget. As George Kennan observed: ‘the unconditional surrender of Germany . . . left us with the sole responsibility for a section of Germany which had never been economically self-supporting in modern times and the capacity of which for self-support had been catastrophically reduced by the circumstances of the war and the German defeat. At the moment we accepted that responsibility we had no program for the rehabilitation of the economy of our zone, preferring to leave all
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