The Senate Reserve (German: Senatsreserve) was a stockpile of food and other necessities which the Senate of West Berlin was required to maintain in case of another Berlin Blockade. It was dissolved after German reunification.
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History
After the Berlin Blockade of 1948/49 and the Berlin Airlift to keep the inhabitants of the western sector supplied, the three Western Allied commanders-in-chief required the Senate of Berlin, which governed under their authority, to establish stockpiles of staple foodstuffs, medication, coal, fuel, industrial raw materials and other daily necessities. The intent was that in case of another blockade, "normal" life could be maintained in West Berlin for at least 180 days, that is, six months, and thus a blockade would no longer make sense. (There was also a West German national foodstuffs reserve, the Bundesreserve, of which a large part was stored in West Berlin, and periodic attempts to encourage the West German populace in general to participate in Aktion Eichhörnchen, "Operation Squirrel", and maintain a stock of necessities. However, these were generally unsuccessful and the term was used mockingly of the Senate Reserve.)
In 1953 it was decided to enlarge the reserve; Eleanor Lansing Dulles came to the city to assist in this and witnessed the disturbances of 16/17 June 1953.
The Senate Reserve stored approximately 4 million tonnes of goods for decades. There were at one stage more than 700 storage facilities in West Berlin, comprising 624,000 square metres of open land and 423,000 square metres of inside storage; most of them were secret, and very few people possessed detailed knowledge of the reserves.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended in 1989, the Senate Reserve was dissolved. Berlin was legally required to obtain the highest possible value for the goods should the reserve be partially or wholly eliminated. However, at the suggestion of the mayor, 90,000 tonnes of foodstuffs, medications and other goods were donated free of charge to the Soviet Union as humanitarian aid.
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The value of the stored goods was approximately 2,000 million DM in the early 1980s, approximately 1,600 million DM when the Senate Reserves were liquidated in 1990. The regular "rotation" in which goods were replaced with fresh supplies cost several million DM annually. The government of the Federal Republic defrayed the high costs of the goods and the turnover.
Old stock which had been replaced was sold at low prices to the population by the Berlin Senate. Cookery books sometimes referred to ingredients, such as tinned beef, as 'Senate Reserve'.
There were continual problems with obsolescence and changing standards, substandard supplies, and pilferage.
The roughly 1,000 items included in the Senate Reserve, for a population of 2 million West Berliners and detailed in a 16-page list, included:
The reserve was to supply a diet of 2,900 calories daily to each normal citizen; during the blockade it had been 1,800.
After the Four-Powers Agreement of 1971, amounts of some items were reduced and the consumer items such as bicycles, clothes and shoes were sold.
Ration cards and coupons
To enable orderly distribution of goods to the populace in an emergency, the Bundesdruckerei (state printing house), which is headquartered in Berlin-Kreuzberg, printed ration cards and coupons:
Storage
Storage locations for the Senate Reserve included: