In the summer of 1950, farmers across East Germany began finding their potato crops stripped bare. The culprit was the Colorado potato beetle, a small, striped insect native to North America that had been spreading steadily across Europe for decades. What happened next had nothing to do with agriculture and everything to do with politics. East German authorities, backed by Soviet messaging, launched a propaganda campaign claiming the United States had deliberately dropped the beetles from aircraft as a biological weapon aimed at destroying the food supply of socialist states. The accusations made front pages, reached schoolchildren through official curricula, and were repeated by communist governments across Eastern Europe for years. Internal documents declassified decades later told a different story entirely.
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