Radio Free Europe and the Invasion of the Colorado Beetles ©

The East German anti-American propaganda or disinformation campaign involving Colorado beetles began in May 1950, when the Amt für Information der Regierung der DDR published a 24-page propaganda pamphlet HALT Amikäfer (Stop Yankee Beetles). The pamphlet included maps, illustrations, and the allegations that American planes had dropped Colorado beetles over the potato fields to induce  starvation--use of "entomological warfare." The pamphlet described how, “Both private farmers and members of the collectives have expressed their outrage at the most recent crimes of American air gangsters.” 

Berliner Zeitung 5/25/50

The May 25, 1950 Berliner Zeitung newspaper published in the Soviet Zone printed a map showing the route that two American planes supposedly flew as they dropped the beetles the day before.

In addition to the pamphlet, stamps with the same message were produced and distributed.


Journalists from China, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, and Italy were invited to the village of Schönfels near Zwickau on June 17, 1950. They published a protest declaration, which included:

The unanimous testimony of the farmers, who saw the problem in the fields, is that the large number of Colorado beetles appeared a day after the American planes flew over the area. Colorado beetles are smaller than atomic bombs, but they are also a weapon of U.S. Imperialism against the peace-loving working population. We journalists, who serve peace, hereby condemn this new criminal method of the American warmongers.

On June 30, 1950, the Soviet Union Foreign Ministry delivered a protest note to the U.S. State Department stating that it had received information from the DDR that between May 22, 1950, and June 6, 1950, American planes dropped Colorado beetles in many districts of the country. On July 6, 1950, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson rejected the protest as “Communist propaganda.” The State Department official reply to Moscow included: 

In the present world situation, fraught with explosive tensions, the Soviet Government has chosen to poison the atmosphere even further with one of the most fantastic fabrications that has ever been invented by one government against another. In this whole absurd and ridiculous propaganda invention, this is the one fact that deserves to be noted.

1951

In June 1951, there was a traveling exhibition in Czechoslovakia of the Colorado beetles ("americky brouk") that were allegedly dropped in the displayed Coca Cola bottles from American planes over the country and the DDR. Reportedly one million match boxes were distributed telling the population of the danger of the beetle and to report any findings of the bugs to the authorities.

Similar match boxes were reportedly distributed in Hungary advising those who found the beetles, dropped by the Americans, to report the findings to the police.

In August 1951, the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) created the Free Europe Press, which was used not only for the printing of various publications in the USA and Europe but also for the printing of leaflets and launching of balloons to carry them to Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. Permanent launching sites were set up in Fronau, Freying, and Hohenhard, West Germany.

The first balloons were launched on August 13, 1951 in an open field along the Czechoslovak border. This test operation, known as the “Winds of Freedom,” was on an experimental stand-alone basis, i.e., the launching of the balloons was not fully part of a coordinated programming effort with Radio Free Europe broadcasts. The Free Europe Press printed up millions of propaganda leaflets to be launched. The leaflets contained such slogans as "A new hope is stirring," and "Friends of Freedom in other lands have found a new way to reach you." The schedule and frequencies of Radio Free Europe’s broadcasts to Czechoslovakia were on the reverse side of the leaflets.

Some of the balloons were carried away by the winds from Czechoslovakia into the East Germany (DDR) state of Saxony. Reportedly, two of the balloons were shot down by the “Peoples Police” near the cities of Chemnitz, Plauen, and Zwickau.

The leaflets were written in Czech and gave the broadcasting schedules of Radio Free Europe. Most of the population in the area did not read Czech so the East Germans decided to use the balloons and leaflets in the ongoing anti-American propaganda.

It so happens that in the summer of 1951, East Germany began the annual “voluntary” search campaign through out the country for Colorado beetles that threatened the potato fields. Now East German propaganda warned in posters about the ingenious American way of sending thousands of Colorado beetles in small bags attached to the balloons that would burst open upon landing and destroy the potato fields. 

On Sunday, September 23, 1951, over 200,000 “volunteers”, including school-aged children, from 57 communities began searching for the balloon beetles in the potato fields.  Authorities announced that 26,000 “American” Colorado beetles had been found. The anti-American Sunday campaign was announced as so “successful” that they would continue each Sunday until the harvest was completed as a symbol for the anti-American demonstrations.

Here are other examples of other anti-American posters that appeared in the DDR:

 

 Norbert Muhlen wrote in the February 1, 1953, issue of the magazine Commentary 

“Potato bugs” is the derisive label given to charges the Soviets level at America. For the “hate America” campaign had begun with the story that American planes had dropped Colorado beetles—an insect popularly called  “potato bug”—over East Germany in order to destroy her potato crop (and  also by way of training American aviators for germ warfare, and at the same time opening up a market for Wall Street’s insecticides). But the East Germans never spotted any bug-carrying American planes, and they soon learned the real reason why their potato fields were full of beetles, and why they were unable to get rid of them—unlike West Germany, which had also been visited by the pests. East German insect-control experts had been fired as non-Communists, and East Germany’s stocks of insecticide had been transferred to Poland on Russian orders. By 1952 people in East Germany were sentenced to jail just for muttering “potato bug.”

The use of the Colorado beetle in propaganda appeared again in 1955, when the Czechoslovak newspaper Rude Pravo contained a commentary of one K. Vanek, who wrote, “For years and months the stream of slander spread by the heckling radio station FREE EUROPE proved that it serves one purpose: to disturb, to poison, to subvert … the subversive and espionage activities do not end … they include also sabotage in the economic sector, as for instance the spreading of the Colorado beetle.”

Erhard Geissler, identified as a German biological warfare expert said in a BBC World Service program of September 3, 2013: "The story was aimed at covering the government's own inability to fight the beetles, and provided a handy extra accusation to hurl at the Americans … the East German government did not believe the story themselves. They were not stupid. They had political convictions and they were concerned by the increasing danger of the developing Cold War, but I do not think they were stupid enough to believe their own propaganda. There is no factual basis for the story about the Yankee beetles at all."