What difference did you see between Drusag and the collective farms in Ukraine and the North Caucasus?
The difference was simply that the agriculture in the concession was enormously flourishing, extremely efficient. You didn’t have to be an agronome, which God knows I’m not, to see that there the crops, the cattle, everything, was completely different from the surrounding countryside. Moreover, there were hordes of people, literally hordes of people trying to get in, because there was food there, which gave a more poignant sense to the thing than anything except that service in the church. The German agronomes themselves were telling me about it. They’d been absolutely bombarded with people trying to come there to work, do anything if they could get in, because there was food there. Q: I have read in a British Foreign Office dispatch that Drusag employed five people simply to pick up bodies of peasants who had come in and died of hunger. A: Yes, that’s what I’d heard too, if not more. The peasants staggered in and dropped dead. Q: Were the Germans able to do anything for the peasants?
