Mercedes Simon wrote about catching a parachute and sharing the candy with her sister. Her letter, like Zimmermann’s, described a specific event in specific terms. Simon also participated in later commemorations.
Both letters are cited in sources based on Halvorsen’s own accounts and in journalism from the 1990s and 2000s that covered the airlift anniversaries. The letters themselves were preserved; Halvorsen kept correspondence from the period, and some of it has been archived. The names are real and the experiences they describe are part of the documented record.
There were, of course, many other letters. The number of drops, the population density of the neighborhoods under the flight path, and the duration of the operation suggest that the letters Halvorsen received numbered in the hundreds. Most of those correspondents have not been identified by name in the sources available here, but their existence is established by the fact of the letters themselves.
## The Language of the Drops
One dimension of the candy drops that received less attention in American press coverage, but that deserves acknowledgment, is what it meant that an American was doing this for German children.
The children at the Tempelhof fence in July 1948 were German. Their parents and grandparents had lived through, and in many cases participated in, the Nazi regime that the United States had just finished fighting at enormous cost. The war in Europe had ended three years before. American soldiers were still occupying Germany. The people who administered the American occupation zone included former prisoners of war camps, trials of Nazi war criminals, and programs for identifying former Nazi Party members.