Base spending turned Germany’s poorest region into a boom economy

Evidence

The millions of dollars in base construction and spending that accompanied the buildup of Little Americas also helped improve relations with locals. Before the arrival of U.S. troops in Rheinland-Pfalz, for example, the rural state was Germany’s “traditional poorhouse.” After more than a hundred thousand GIs and family members arrived between 1950 and 1951, rapid construction created thousands of new jobs. Unemployment, which had been over 10 percent in the region and over 22 percent in the town of Baumholder, vanished amid a gold rush atmosphere. With a strong U.S. dollar, Americans splashed money around the local economy. By 1955, they were spending almost 5 million a year (the equivalent of 44 million today) in Baumholder alone, a town of around twenty-five hundred that came to host an average of thirty thousand U.S. troops and family members. People in Rheinland-Pfalz now remember the decade as the “Fabulous Fifties” and the “Golden Years.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 126

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated purpose — military base economic impacts on host communities.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 126
• XREF: connects to: German reunification delivered a vast low-cost labor pool to employers — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 125; Germany’s two-trillion-euro absorption contrasted with post-Soviet war and poverty elsewhere — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 109