ABSTRACT
State intervention in support of agriculture, either directly through tariffs and price guarantees or indirectly through subsidised credits as offered from the Kreditanstalt was a development, which had occurred long before 1945. Baumgart calculated the share of European Recovery Program (ERP) funds to agriculture between 1949 and 1956 to be 7.4 per cent of all ERP loans which indicates a decline in agriculture's share since 1952. Nazi economic policy and its ruthless exploitation of the occupied territories had ensured a fairly stable food supply in Germany up until the very last months of the war. For political reasons the Bank deutscher Länder was not prepared to grant loans under the work creation scheme's Schwerpunktprogramm to the Kreditanstalt fÜr Wiederaufbau on similarly favourable low interest terms. Most of the money came from the ERP Special Assets that is from interests or repayments of previous ERP loans.
