The Yankee Beetle Battle
In June of 1950, news reports in the German Democratic Republic (known to us as East Germany) sensationalized a wave of destruction brought about by an infestation of Colorado Potato Beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) soon after American airplanes were seen flying over the area. Colorado beetles had been seen in East Germany before, but never as early or as many as that year. A propaganda campaign was created by the GDR government to rouse volunteers to collect the pests by hand-picking them from the leaves of potato plants. East Germans called the pest “Amikafer”-- Yankee Beetle. The posters shown are part of the campaign. They depict the beetles as American soldiers being dropped from airplanes, wearing Capitalist dollar signs on their backs, and demonstrate for its citizens how to collect and destroy the beetles.
Though East German farmers had seen the Colorado Potato Beetle since it had entered Europe in a shipment of American potatoes in the late 19th century, the farmers who had experienced the worst infestation in 1950 claimed that the numbers of beetles found were many times more than ever before, the infestation came in late May rather than mid-July. The farmers also claimed that there hadn’t been an infestation of larvae prior to the beetle infestation, and that the beetles were all the same size, indicating that the beetles had been bred. Some East Germans believed that American airplanes really had dropped these destructive “small atomic bombs” on East Germany in order to thwart reconstruction efforts after WWII and East Germany’s Soviet occupation. However, many East Germans believed that the propaganda was simply a means to draw blame away from the GDR government for its inability to acquire pesticides to deal with the infestation; most pesticides that were being produced in GDR were sent to the Soviet Union. Instead, children were called to go to local potato fields after school to pick beetles off from plants. Children caught 20 to 25 beetles a day, then the beetles were destroyed away from the field.