By 1943, the following joke was recorded in Germany, reflecting realities of life in the wartime Reich. It purported to be a conversation in a pet shop.
Customer: ‘What kinds of dogs do you have for sale?’
Salesman: ‘Pekinese, dwarf poodles, Yorkshire terriers.’
Customer: ‘Stop, stop – haven’t you got a dog big enough for a family of five?’1
Clearly, by 1943, with the heady days of victory well behind them, Germans on the home front were beginning to face the realities of a long war.
In the early stages of the war, the German conquest of much of Europe cushioned the civilian population within the Reich from many of the harsh realities of war. Germans on the home front benefited from the sausages, furniture, shoes and Christmas geese that the military sent back home from occupied Europe. On a larger scale, looting by government agencies assisted in the financing of the war. It was the economics of plunder, designed to protect the standards of living within the Third Reich itself and enhance the popularity of the Nazi regime.2
However, even at the start of the war it was clear that Germany held inadequate food stocks for a drawn-out conflict. From August/September 1939, rationing was introduced for items as varied as bread, cereal products, meat, butter, cheese, sugar and eggs. By mid-1941, fruit was added to the list and potatoes were rationed from April 1942. By the end of that year, non-rationed foodstuffs made up only 0.3 per cent of the food supply of an average German working-class family.3 The quality of food also declined. For example, bread contained up to 20 per cent barley flour and consequently was bitter tasting. From January 1943, household goods were also rationed, with priority given to victims of bombing raids. Despite the existence of a black market in goods smuggled from neighbouring countries,4 police enforcement of price controls meant that it was not until the closing months of the war that inflation began to spiral upwards. By that time tobacco had long been established as a substitute currency acceptable for purchasing foodstuff.
Those on the home front were initially classified, for rationing purposes, as being in one of three categories: ‘normal consumers’ (on 2,400 calories per day), ‘heavy workers’ (3,600 calories), or ‘very heavy workers’ (4,200 calories). About 40 per cent of Germans were classified as ‘normal consumers’. A fourth category – ‘workers on long hours’ – was later added with calorific intake between the first two categories.5
It is surprising that only in the disastrous military situation of 1943 did the Nazi regime finally require women to even register for possible mobilization.6 In fact, during the first six months of the war (September 1939 to February 1940), the number of women workers had actually declined by 400,000. This was due to generous allowances given to soldiers’ wives in an effort to boost morale. And the number of marriages had gone up dramatically in 1939, as war approached. This trend and the government response did nothing to meet the need for more workers, which by the spring of 1940 was getting desperate. Faced with the requirement to mobilize more workers, the government was torn by a dilemma. With the nightmare of the 1918 collapse of morale always haunting it, the regime was not willing to consider the unpopular option of conscripting women. But, on the other hand, it was reluctant to entice them into work with increased wages since this ran the risk of overly boosting consumer spending with the attendant risk of inflation.7 Even so, from June 1940, women’s wages in the public sector were raised from 75 to 80 per cent of that paid to men. However, despite labour shortages, the regime refused to pay equal wages for equal work. After much pressure to do so from the German Labour Front (DAF) organization, Hitler finally settled the issue in April 1944, saying, ‘If one was to equate the wages of women with men then this would be in total contradiction to the national socialist principle of the maintenance of the national community.’ Furthermore, he claimed, ‘An increase in women’s wages would in practice simply mean strengthening the black market.’8 Nevertheless, by1942, 52 per cent of the German labour force was female (compared with 37.4 per cent in 1939). Even so, fear of antagonizing women – and their soldier-husbands – meant that the Nazis were reluctant to introduce conscription of women. Instead, foreign labour was used, often involving severe coercion.
The reluctance to conscript women was particularly obvious with regard to the armed forces. In 1939, about 16,000 women were employed as secretaries, cooks, telephonists, etc. After September 1939, a little-publicized armed forces recruitment drive took place but – apart from women serving in occupied countries and in the air-attack warning units – none wore military uniform. This was in line with the Nazi social agenda of excluding women from the workplace whenever possible. But labour demands increased as men were drafted into the armed services. From 1941, the six months’ labour service expected of young women was extended by another six months of war service.
In 1942, much to the disapproval of Hitler – but made inevitable by acute labour shortages – women were at last employed in armaments production. This soon extended into service in the military. The trend, once started, was unstoppable. In 1943, women were deployed to service anti-aircraft units. However, their responsibilities did not include firing the guns. By 1944, women were operating searchlights. When the war ended in May 1945, there were a total of 50,000 women working in antiaircraft units and 30,000 operating searchlights. In this role they worked alongside teenagers, Russian POWs, Poles, Czechs and Hungarians. Göring remarked that his flak batteries resembled a meeting of the League of Nations.9
In total, somewhere in the region of 570,000 women were eventually involved in armed services duties of one kind or another. The extent to which Nazi attitudes had been forced to change, as a result of the chastening circumstances of the failing war, is revealed in an order of Hitler’s, minuted by Martin Bormann in February 1945. It involved the raising of a women’s battalion, which the Führer hoped, ‘will have a salutary effect on the attitude of the men’.10 It was a long way from the early Nazi slogan of a woman’s role being confined to ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (children, kitchen, church). Even so, many middle-class women were able to evade war work, a fact that led to vocal protests from their working-class sisters in the national community.11
Other attempts to control women were seen in varied areas of life. The Interior Ministry issued a ban on women wearing trousers other than work and sport clothes. Not surprisingly, the police found the ban difficult to enforce due to problems in differentiating work and sport clothes from trousers worn for reasons of fashion. A police report from Tübingen in April 1942 outlined how hard the job was and explained that in cold weather it was understandable that some women wore trousers. In the end the matter was resolved by the head of the SS and chief of all police forces, Heinrich Himmler, in an edict of December 1944. In it he ordered all police units to stop enforcing the ban. Women trouser-wearers had triumphed over the fashion enforcers of the Third Reich.
More worrying were the strains that the war brought to German marriages. A report by the SS Security Service (the SD) in November 1943 noted that soldiers and their wives were living such different lives that visits home on leave were often accompanied by frequent arguments. Another SD report in April 1944 commented that ‘large numbers of women are tending to be increasingly sexually active. This is particularly evident in the case of soldiers’ wives.’12 The same report noted that some women believed their husbands serving abroad had casual sex and that this made them more inclined to do the same. More materialistic were the women who – according to the report – traded sex for silk stockings and other items from German soldiers who had acquired these in occupied countries. Even more shocking was the evidence for sexual relationships between German women and prisoners of war doing labouring jobs in Germany. For this the punishment was one year in a concentration camp for the German woman involved. Police were ordered, in January 1940, not to intervene if the local community physically punished such women by cutting off their hair. Sanctions were particularly severe when the POW involved was a Pole or Russian. At Königsberg, ‘Frau Martha S.’ was sentenced to ten years in prison and a further ten years’ loss of civil rights for sexual relations with a Polish POW.
Despite these negative effects of the war, other women made a significant unpaid contribution to the war effort. Volunteer female members of the Nazi welfare organization the NSV played a valuable role.13 Mostly funded by voluntary contributions made to the Winter Aid Programme – and numbering over one million women – the NSV was involved in many roles, but one of the most high profile was its Railway Station Service. Offering advice and assistance to mothers and children, young people, the old and the infirm, they also dispensed soup and tea. These NSV volunteers were a friendly face to travellers in a nation that was becoming increasingly chaotic. Other NSV volunteers ran crèches in factories. They remind us that Germany had a fairly comprehensive welfare system. But, before their caring role should be overstated, it needs to be remembered that – unsurprisingly in the Third Reich – the official NSV directive, of May 1942, explicitly reminded them that: ‘Jews, Poles, Gypsies, asocials etc. should not be looked after.’ The care they offered extended only as far as those designated as ‘German compatriots’.14 This brutal racial outlook influenced all the social policies of the Third Reich. A striking example is the response of senior officials to a planned postwar pension scheme; one senior doctor noted disapprovingly that ‘from a biological perspective’ the scheme would cater for those who had ‘become less important for the fate of the nation’.15
Since the German bombing of British cities had failed to break civilian morale, it should come as no surprise to discover that Allied bombing failed to destroy that of German civilians, as some realized at the time.16 As one Berliner – Ursula von Kardorff – noted in January 1944: ‘The catastrophes which are hitting the Nazis and the anti-Nazis equally are binding the nation together.’ And she concluded: ‘If the British think they are going to undermine our morale they are barking up the wrong tree.’17 And Ursula was no Nazi; indeed she was unsympathetic to the regime. Nevertheless, as we shall see, whilst the raids did not break the German people they steadily eroded support for the regime. Incidentally, this bombing of German cities was carried out almost entirely by the British and Americans, the Soviets making little contribution to the air bombardment in contrast to their massive ground operations.
Evacuation caused the same distress in Germany as in Britain. A secret report of the SD in November 1943 concluded that the situation of having to be ‘guests of strangers and have to ask for every utensil is in the long run intolerable’. Furthermore, ‘Reference is frequently also made to the sexual problem and the danger of marriage break-up.’ The SD also noted: ‘There are already reports to the effect that the morals of evacuated wives are anything but satisfactory.’ It is particularly striking how the common stresses of war cross all cultural and national boundaries. The SD noted: ‘The longing of the parents and of the children for each other is getting everybody down.’ One coalminer sadly commented, ‘As long as I’m at work I don’t think about it, [the fact his family had been evacuated] but the moment I get home I start worrying. I miss my wife and my children’s laughter.’ The SD report adds that, as he spoke, the man cried.
Social tensions also understandably increased. In the Dortmund area, in October 1943, some 300 women demonstrated because – having returned home – their ration books had been withdrawn in an attempt to force them to leave the city. The police were called but refused to arrest the women.18
However, as the war continued, the horrors of bombing made the need for evacuation obvious. One by one the major cities of Germany were smashed by bombing.19 An early target was Hamburg.20 In the firestorms that engulfed Hamburg on the night of 27–8 July 1943, the death toll was 35–40,000 people. A report by the police chief of Hamburg reveals why it was hard to be sure about exact casualty figures. ‘On the basis of a layer of ashes in a large air raid shelter, doctors could only provide a rough estimate of the number of people who died there, a figure of 250–300.’21 Despite official claims that calm was maintained, there is – unsurprisingly – evidence to the contrary. Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, who was there, described how, ‘It is hard to imagine the panic and chaos. Each one for himself, only one idea: flight.’ But that was not easy with railway stations gutted, trams and underground inoperative; so thousands fled with their belongings loaded onto carts and prams.22
Even more infamous was the bombing of Dresden on the nights of 13–15 February 1945, which killed perhaps as many as 25,000 people (although possible figures as high as 40,000 have also been suggested) and destroyed about 39 square kilometres (15 square miles) of the city centre. Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war science-fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five (published in 1969), was based on his own experiences as a prisoner of war at Dresden during the bombing. This attack still attracts major controversies over whether the raid was necessary and whether such high civilian casualties could be justified. It was not until 2005 that the ruined Lutheran Frauenkirche (the baroque Church of Our Lady) was finally reconstructed and re-consecrated.23
The government authorities made efforts to raise morale with increased rations – including chocolate and real coffee – to those bombed out. In Essen, each adult affected received 50 grams (1.7 ounces) of coffee and half a bottle of brandy. Children received 125 grams (4.4 ounces) of sweets. Mobile canteens also provided free meals for up to three days after a raid. However, by the end of the war, local government was overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophe. In a survey carried out in Cologne after the war, 90 per cent of those interviewed concluded that bombing was the worst hardship they faced during the war. In contrast, only 10 per cent cited food shortages.24 There is evidence that this suffering struck at support for the Nazi government. SD reports in June 1943 noted the increase in hostile remarks and the Führer himself was not above criticism. The SD further noted that ‘Heil, Hitler’ salutes were rare in cities that had experienced heavy bombing. A joke going the rounds had a Berliner and Essener comparing bombing experiences. The Berliner recalled how, five hours after the raid, windows were still falling out of houses. To which the Essener replied that in Essen, fourteen days after the last raid, pictures of the Führer were still flying out of the windows. The fact that this found its way into an official SD report reveals something of the widespread nature of such negative comments.25
From 1944, bombing disrupted armaments production, oil supplies, transport systems and the aircraft industry.26 It also caused German fighters, desperately needed elsewhere, to be deployed defending the home front; German aircraft production became over-focused on building fighters rather than other aircraft.27 It curtailed industrial expansion (1941–4), then severely damaged it thereafter, additionally forcing dispersal of production.28
The leaders of the Third Reich were surprisingly reluctant to mobilize the German civilian population for ‘total war’, a situation not helped by the chaotic nature of Nazi government. In this there was a striking contrast with Britain and even more so with the USSR. There was real tension between Hitler and Goebbels over this issue, with the latter convinced that the resources of the entire German nation needed to be focused on the war. The Propaganda Minister even attempted to mobilize public opinion to put pressure on Hitler to change his mind. On 18 February 1943, Goebbels made a long speech to a carefully selected audience at Berlin’s Sports Palace. In it he called for a whole range of radical measures including rallying the whole population to war work, a sixteen-hour working day if it was necessary to achieve victory, women to free men for the front (especially the Eastern Front), harsh measures against draft dodgers and black marketeers, and an equal burden of work across the whole of German society. In this call for ‘total war’, he ended with the cry that had rallied Germans against Napoleon in 1814: ‘Let volk (people/nation) rise up and storm break loose’.29 And yet, even then, Germany never mobilized in a manner comparable with those nations that eventually defeated it.
There were attempts to rationalize war production but, even so, the manufacturing of German military equipment was never standardized in the way it was in the Allied nations, and it failed to replicate the Allied production lines producing huge numbers of fewer types of weapons.30 Instead, the German system involved too many small industries which made German production far less efficient. This problem was increased by Allied bombing and loss of areas that had supplied Germany with raw materials (such as Romanian oil). However, it was not until 1945 that armaments production collapsed and this was largely caused by the bombing of transport facilities over the winter of 1944–5. Efforts to increase productivity of the German workers included bonuses paid in tobacco and alcohol, preserved vegetables and condensed milk.
From the summer of 1944 onwards, Hitler favoured a policy of destroying industry in areas abandoned by the retreating German army. This was a policy that was ignored by many in these areas. The Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, persuaded Hitler that an alternative policy of crippling factories by removing vital components was better since these factories could then be reactivated if German forces reoccupied these areas. But on 19 March 1945, Hitler ordered that this ‘crippling strategy’ should finally give way to ‘scorched earth’. This same decree stripped Speer of responsibilities in this area of the economy. Speer resisted, persuaded Hitler to revise his destruction order, was eventually reinstated on 30 March and used his influence to exploit ambiguities in the revised decree to block fanatical Nazis in their intentions to destroy industries and infrastructure. Speer consequently has come to be seen as the man who saved western Germany from total self-inflicted destruction. However, he was not alone in this aim since employers and their workers actively resisted attempts to destroy industry. Speer – although genuinely wishing to preserve Germany – was probably also looking to a personal future beyond the Third Reich.
By 1944, German official statistics listed 7.6 million foreign workers and POWs in industry within the territory of the Greater German Reich (the borders of Germany itself, as expanded by Nazi territorial seizures). This made up about 25 per cent of the German labour force by this stage of the war. Most of these were forced labourers, many from Poland and the USSR. There was the usual Nazi racial hierarchy, with workers from Western Europe treated better than Poles and Russians.
More and more of the Gestapo’s activities went into policing and punishing these foreign workers within Germany. However, evidence suggests that, from 1941, citizens became less willing to inform, even on ‘delinquent’ foreign workers – especially after 1944. Though in the case of foreign workers this may in fact indicate that the Gestapo was no longer keeping records of those it shot as ‘it began to dispense with even the semblance of regulations’.31
From January 1943, seventeen-year-olds were called up to assist with air defence. It was this forced mobilization of young people that saw Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, conscripted into the auxiliary anti-aircraft corps. In some areas entire classes were conscripted en masse. Some of these boys responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to do their bit. One wrote in his diary, in August 1944, after his unit had shot down two aircraft on the Baltic coast: ‘Everyone’s very excited; they say it would be great if we got the Flak [anti-aircraft] badge.’32 Others were less willing. In one town, in March 1945, the Hitler Youth Home Guard unit was locked in a room until they ‘volunteered’ to join the SS. That same month, sixteen-year-olds were conscripted.
Many of these young soldiers fought in the Volkssturm (Home Guard), which was formed in September 1944, as the Reich faced invasion. They dug anti-tank ditches and formed anti-tank units armed with Panzerfäuste (bazookas). A famous film clip, from 20 March 1945, shows Hitler talking to and patting the faces of young soldiers in an award ceremony. The youngest recipient was the ironically surnamed Alfred Czech (aged 12 years). He won his Iron Cross for rescuing twelve wounded German soldiers under enemy artillery and machine-gun fire.
As it became clear that Germany was losing the war and Allied bombing devastated German cities, the country turned to bitter sarcasm:
‘What will you do after the war?’
‘I’ll finally go on a holiday and will take a trip round Greater Germany!’
‘And what will you do in the afternoon?’33
As the Red Army threatened Berlin, the young and old were drafted into the Home Guard. However bravely these fighters were presented in the German propaganda it was obvious to all that they stood no chance against the seasoned Soviet troops. A cynical joke asked: ‘Who has gold in his mouth, silver in his hair and lead in his limbs? A Volkssturmmann.’
Another bitter joke detailed the following scenario: ‘An officer of the Volkssturm finds only a third of his men on parade: The second third has gone to the post office to collect invalidity pensions and the other third has had to attend confirmation classes.’34
Those drafted into this Home Guard were divided into four contingents by a decree of October 1944. The first contingent was made up of those capable of active service (despite their age) and some were sent direct to the front despite the inadequacy of their training. The second contingent was those employed in vital war work and were exempt from immediate deployment. Many men tried to be placed in this contingent. The third contingent included teenagers, while the fourth contingent were those incapable of combat duties but who could be used for guard duties. Whilst many attempted to avoid duties in this ill-prepared and ill-equipped army of doomed men and boys, others threw themselves into the frantic defence of the Fatherland.
This commitment to fight to the end was reinforced by the Nazi regime’s refusal to negotiate any form of surrender and the Allies demand, from early 1943, for unconditional surrender. Amongst German civilians, as well as soldiers, there was another major factor that encouraged last-ditch fighting. And this was a sense of complicity in the crimes of the regime. SD reports picked up these sentiments. Amongst victims of bombing were heard comments that this was punishment on Germany for what had been done to the Jews. Most German civilians knew that their nation had not only visited war on Europe but had done so in an appalling fashion. German propaganda in the final months of the war encouraged this sense of being bound together in a ‘community of fate’. On the eastern borders of the Reich there was the added terror of the Russians and the revenge they were pursuing against the nation that had caused the deaths of about 26 million citizens of the USSR. Nazi foreign policy – and its failure – had brought the much-feared Red hordes into Germany itself. This fear permeated every level of the home front in the dying days of Hitler’s Germany. A new form of greeting became commonplace amongst German civilians: ‘Bleib übrig’ (stay alive). The letters ‘BU’ could be found chalked on walls.
With the arrival of the Red Army in eastern Germany, Soviet actions equalled the worst propaganda fears as huge numbers of German women were brutally raped. Estimates of victims run as high as two million women. The horror of defeat was forced upon the defenceless and helpless. In the aftermath of these atrocities many Germans committed suicide. Others did so as Soviet forces drew closer. Reports of Soviet violence towards civilians preceded the Red Army once it had crossed the eastern borders of the Reich. In the Pomeranian village of Schivelbein, the Protestant pastor wrote of families who ‘drowned themselves, hanged themselves, slit their wrists, or allowed themselves to be burned up along with their homes’. Other eastern German towns saw similar tragedies. In Schönlanke, 500 committed suicide; in Demmin, 700.35 And everywhere, the Soviet soldiers looted. Watches were particularly highly prized and the famous photograph of Red Army soldiers raising the red flag on the captured Reichstag had to be airbrushed by Soviet censors to remove the multiple watches visible on the wrist of one of the soldiers. Everything moveable was liable to be stolen and shipped eastward. Some Russian soldiers later wrote of their anger at seeing the comfortable state of German farms and homes in East Prussia. Why, they questioned, had those who already possessed so much invaded and devastated the USSR?36
In the street-by-street battle for Berlin, in April and May 1945, somewhere in the region of 22,000 German civilians died. As the Red Army advanced, civilians faced terrible dilemmas. To surrender too soon ran the risk of being killed by SS and Nazi paramilitaries if the street was not overrun, or was recaptured. To delay surrender risked being shot by Russian soldiers. Many Berliners – who mistimed their hanging out of white bed-sheets – were hanged on lampposts by fellow Germans as the city disintegrated into chaos. These were the bitter realities of the Third Reich’s defeat on the German home front.
1. Hillenbrand, F.K.M., Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945, Routledge, 1995, p. 184.
2. Aly, Götz, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Metropolitan Books, 2007.
3. Noakes, Jeremy (ed.), Nazism 1919–1945, vol. IV, The German Home Front in World War II, A Documentary Reader, University of Exeter Press, 1998, p. 511.
4. Whiting, Charles, The Home Front – Germany, Time-Life Books, 1982, p. 63.
5. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 512.
6. Bendersky, Joseph W., A History of Nazi Germany: 1919–1945, 2nd edn, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, p. 213.
7. Mason, Tim, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the ‘National Community’, Berg, 1993, p. 236.
8. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 354.
9. Boog, Horst, Krebs, Gerhard and Vogel, Detlef, Cook-Radmore, Derry (trans.), Germany and the Second World War, vol. VII, The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia, 1943–1944/5, 2006, Clarendon Press, p. 225.
10. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 342.
11. Stephenson, Jill, The Nazi Organisation of Women, Croom Helm, 1981, p. 216.
12. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 386.
13. Stephenson, Jill, op. cit., pp. 178–213, analyses the role of the NSV during the war years.
14. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 276.
15. Ibid., p. 294.
16. Nalty, Bernard C., (ed.) Winged Shield, Winged Sword 1907–1950: A History of the United States Air Force, University Press of the Pacific, 1997, p. 189.
17. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 565.
18. Ibid., pp. 362–5.
19. See Friedrich, J., The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945, Columbia University Press, 2008.
20. See Lowe, Keith, Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943, Viking, 2007.
21. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 556.
22. Ibid., p. 557.
23. Recent works examining the bombing of Dresden include: Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February, 1945, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005; Addison, Paul, Crang, Jeremy A. (eds), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden 1945, Pimlico, 2006.
24. Overy, Richard, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich, Penguin, 1996, p. 103.
25. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 568.
26. Overy, Richard, Why the Allies Won, revised edition, Pimlico, 2006, pp. 152–3.
27. Ibid., pp. 395–6.
28. Ibid., pp. 156–163.
29. For analysis of the significance of this speech, see Bytwerk, Randall L. (ed. and trans.), Landmark speeches of National Socialism, Texas A & M University Press, 2008, pp. 112–39.
30. Overy, Richard, 2006, op. cit., pp. 247–9, pp. 266–7.
31. Gellately, Robert, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 261.
32. Noakes, Jeremy, op. cit., p. 411.
33. Herzog, Rudolph, Heil Hitler, das Schwein ist Tot! (Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead), Eichborn-Verlag, 2006, translated and quoted in www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,434399,00.html
34. Hillenbrand, F.K.M., op. cit., p. 190.
35. Evans, Richard, The Third Reich at War, Penguin, 2008, pp. 732–3.
36. Ibid., p. 708.