The Soviet deliveries – desperately needed to provide the eastern expellees with food, heat, and basic necessities, and to increase agricultural production in the remaining cultivation area – did not materialise. Consequently, the American military administrator, Lucius D. Clay, stopped the transfer of supplies and dismantled factories from the Ruhr area to the Soviet sector on 3 May 1946[7] while the expellees from the areas under Soviet rule were deported to the West until the end of 1948. As a result of the halt of deliveries from the western zones, the Soviet Union started a public relations campaign against American policy and began to obstruct the administrative work of all four zones.