Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, May 23rd, 1950, farmers in East Germany spotted American cargo planes flying over their fields.

This was, of course, very early in the Cold War, East Germany had only been East Germany for about a year or so at this point,

but the non-military warfare that would come to define the battle between the United States and the Soviet

Block, the Cold War, it had had already begun and this was an early

effort that came allegedly in the form of the beetle the day after those

American cargo planes flew over the East German fields, farmers discovered

that their fields were covered with Colorado potato beetles, an insect which can devastate

potato crops.

This series of events was quickly propagandized

with East Germany claiming that the invasive beetles

had been brought to the country on purpose.

The evidence for that is murky at best and we will get into kind of whether this actually

happened or whether this was mostly propaganda and so forth, but here to discuss the Cold War,

beetle battle.

R, as always, Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of

Wesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. A quick shout out to our producer Jacob Feldman,

who does the research for every episode often puts very funny

clever titles at the top of it and this one he dubbed it beetle mania which is very good and

I have now actually in in my head, developed a theory that this maybe is where the

beetle mania came from because the beetles got their start in Germany as people may know and

...