The German War (11 page)

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The regime knew that both military victory and its own political survival depended on how successfully and equitably it fed the German population. In the First World War, food distribution had been a disaster, with rampant price inflation and an even more exorbitant black market reducing the urban working class to near-famine conditions. The Royal Navy’s blockade, the provisioning crisis and the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 had paved the way for the revolution of November 1918. In the Ruhr by 1916, children’s growth was markedly stunted. By 1917 and 1918, the death rate of civilians living in Berlin had outstripped that of soldiers conscripted from the city; it had been highest amongst teenage girls and young women, as tuberculosis swept through the unheated tenement blocks that housed the urban working class. This, the authorities were determined, would not occur again. Hitler in particular remained apprehensive about what level of hardship the German people would endure, and the SD’s reports duly found that the ‘mood of the population’ was influenced by food supplies more than anything else.
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Food rationing was introduced on 27 August 1939, the day after Germany mobilised its armed forces. ‘For a couple of days my stomach has been troubling me, especially now that we have to save on food,’ Irene Reitz reluctantly reported to her boyfriend Ernst Guicking, conscious that civilians were not meant to give soldiers reason to worry. Watching everyone else foraging for flour, sugar and fat in the first weeks of the war, she had not worried, confining her own efforts to going to a stationer’s and buying ‘silk paper in all colours. You know, to be able to wrap presents prettily in the future. Wasn’t that a good idea?’ In late September it all changed, when one of her co-workers in the flower-growing business in Giessen was called up: he had always brought in extra bread and sausage for her lunch from his village. ‘I miss him a lot now, especially the sandwiches,’ Irene admitted.
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Fearing a run on the shops, the sale of linen, footwear and clothing was prohibited except for those with an official chit. But as the public piled into the understaffed rationing offices, the bureaucrats had no way of checking if the claimants needed the items they were asking for. Though they had to sign a declaration consenting to having their households inspected, it is doubtful how far this deterred civilians gripped by fear of a goods famine. ‘Anyone with two pairs of shoes doesn’t receive a new chit to buy a new pair,’ Irene reported to Ernst. ‘So of course everyone writes that he only has one pair. Thank God that I’ve not needed to go there yet. You can easily queue for two hours.’ Meanwhile, the SD reported, shopkeepers did not know whether to demand chits for gloves or not, and whether only for leather pairs or also for cloth ones. It took two months to overhaul the system and introduce clothing cards which gave most people 100 points for the coming year, backdated to 1 September. Socks and stockings took 5 points, for example – but no more than five could be bought in a year – pyjamas took 30 and a coat or suit 60 points.
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Dependent on imports for half of its leather, shoe production went into immediate crisis and there was no more leather for resoling shoes; across the country, customers were being told they would have to wait six to eight weeks even for repairs using synthetic soles. However, German consumers had effectively been living in a war economy for the previous six years. Even the return to full employment had not lifted real wages to the level attained prior to the crash of 1929, with household income only rising as more family members found jobs. Years of rearmament, consuming an unheard-of 20 per cent of domestic production in peacetime, curbed the output of clothing, furniture, cars and housewares. Autarchic economic policies, bent on preserving precious foreign currency reserves, restricted imported items like real coffee, turning it into a precious luxury even before 1939. In order to conserve wool and reduce cotton imports, spun rayon was used as a substitute, especially in winter coats, even though it tended to remain stretched after becoming wet and had very poor insulating properties.
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War depressed the standard of living further, driving civilian consumption down 11 per cent during the first year. The national diet became more monotonous, revolving around bread, potatoes and preserves. Beer became thin, sausage was padded out with other ingredients. When the French pulled back from the territory along the Rhine near Kehl, which they had briefly occupied during the Polish campaign, Ernst Guicking grabbed the supplies they abandoned. He was able to send a packet of real coffee back to Irene and her aunt in Giessen. They were delighted to have a break from the synthetic brew known colloquially as ‘Horst Wessel coffee’ because – like the eponymous Nazi martyr of the Party anthem – ‘the beans only marched with them in spirit’.
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Meat shortages were altogether more serious. Germany depended on the import of animal feeds from North America, now cut by the British naval blockade. The cost of feed led to culls in the German swine herd in early autumn. Unlike in Britain, in Germany many industrial workers had traditionally supplemented their wages by tending allotments and keeping rabbits or even a pig, a common practice particularly amongst coal miners. More town-dwellers of all classes now started to cultivate vegetables and keep hens or rabbits, but keeping pigs became less popular, not just because of the high cost of feed but also because such ‘self-providers’ were not entitled to meat rations. Lack of refrigeration was blamed for problems in transporting milk, eggs and meat across the country, with Berlin soon suffering from milk shortfalls. In western Germany the cattle herds were so depleted that only 35–40 per cent of the meat quotas could be handed out, while there was a temporary abundance in the south, with one old Social Democrat marvelling at his butcher’s ability to offer ‘sides of bacon without ration stamps’.
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By issuing food ration cards for periods of four weeks, the Food Ministry maintained maximum flexibility: potatoes could easily be replaced with bread or, less popularly, with rice, if supplies dried up. Because the food stamps could not be carried over to the next month, no mountain of back-claims could accumulate. On the other hand, these short-term horizons and fluctuations rapidly turned food into an obsession, where real and imagined shortages exercised an influence far beyond their actual scale. People of all walks of life, one Social Democratic reporter noted wryly, ‘speak far more about provisioning than about politics. Each person is entirely taken up with how to get his ration. How can I get something extra?’ On Sundays local trains were full of people – including teenagers in Hitler Youth uniform – all leaving the towns to go foraging for foodstuffs in the countryside, much as in the previous war. As a general fear of wartime inflation once again took hold in Germany, people rushed to turn their cash into anything that could be traded later on: luxury items such as furs, porcelain and furniture, which remained unrationed, were swiftly sold out.
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By October 1939, many believed that the country would not be able to hold out as long as in the last war ‘because there’s already nothing left to eat’. Only the soldiers, everyone agreed, had enough. Resentment of the privileged lifestyle of Nazi officials was aired in bitter parody. In Cologne, Josef Grohé became the butt of many jokes, and in early October, a picture of the Gauleiter with his rounded jowls was cut out of the pages of the local paper and pinned up on the blackboard of a factory. Underneath, someone had scrawled:

One people, one leader, one nation

Before the law all are equal

Grohé is starving unstintingly

For the national comrades quite a model.

Four Gestapo officials came to investigate but could not find the culprit. By early November, some local Nazi Party officials were so afraid of being called cowards and shirkers that they asked to serve at the front.
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Social discontent fed off the discrepancy between promise and reality. The rationing system strove to balance merit – as measured through work – and social need in allocating food, which led to an elaborate hierarchy of entitlement. The most stark divide was race. At the outbreak of war, 185,000 registered Jews remained in the Reich, perhaps 40 per cent of the Jewish population of 1933. After the November 1938 pogrom most of the young had emigrated, leaving an ageing and increasingly destitute community, concentrated mainly in the cities, especially Berlin and Frankfurt. They were prevented from buying underwear, shoes and clothing, even for their growing teenage children. Although initially their food rations remained pegged on the same level as everyone else’s – a fact the Kleppers found very reassuring – their cards were speckled with red ‘J’s for ‘
Jude
’, reminding neighbours, shoppers and sales assistants alike to enforce the host of new regulations stipulating where Jews could shop and which foodstuffs they were prohibited from purchasing. Different local authorities set their own shopping curfews to prevent Jews from inconveniencing German shoppers. As Polish prisoners of war and civilian workers were brought to work in German industry, their entitlements were also set below those of their German co-workers.
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Even for ‘Aryan national comrades’, there was no simple, one-size-fits-all allocation, as there was in Britain, a country haunted by its own legacy of unfair and incompetent rationing in the First World War. Instead, Germany started out with three basic categories, covering ‘normal consumers’, ‘heavy workers’ and ‘very heavy workers’. There were supplements for those doing shift- and night-work. Supplements were added for young children, for children aged 6–18, for pregnant women and nursing mothers, as well as for the sick. By April 1945, they had extended into sixteen different categories; in cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants even dogs were allotted offal according to a system grading their usefulness.

The system was based on nutritional research. A 1937 study of 350 workers’ families had established an average benchmark of 2,750 calories per person per day. Further research and lobbying led to much subsequent tweaking. There were warnings from Berlin that shortages of protein and fats might lead to infertility in adolescent girls, thereby undermining the regime’s pro-natalist policies. Women turned these policies to their own advantage, warning that the difficulties they had in feeding their children might dissuade them from having more. The head of the National Socialist People’s Welfare, Erich Hilgenfeldt, successfully pressed for the introduction of ‘family support’ payments to help poorer families fund the food rations they were entitled to draw. In practice, however, ‘family support’ remained very modest, intended to help poorer Germans survive without upsetting the ‘natural order’ of meritocratic social selection. This was a system of state regulation, designed to meet social needs without ever appearing too socialist or egalitarian.
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Inevitably, Germans soon became aware of unfairnesses in this system. With a daily allocation of 4,200 calories, industrial workers doing ‘very heavy labour’ received the most. Exempt from conscription because they were deemed ‘irreplaceable’, they were skilled men whom the coal industry and large armaments factories did not want to lose. The firms were able to count on the support of the German Labour Front and the local Gauleiter, and so had little difficulty when pushing for their workers to be classified in the top band. White-collar workers in offices, retail and commerce lacked the kind of leverage exercised by those in the military-industrial sector and generally received the standard 2,400 calories a day allotted to the ‘normal consumer’, as did middle-class professionals. Researchers for the German Labour Front warned as early as September 1939 that rationing would raise consumption for one half of the population and lower it for the other. There was also a shift in resources from older to younger adults: comparing data from December 1937 and February 1942, a study of 1,774 adult workers found that male workers aged 55–60 and women in the 60–65 group lost weight, whereas men aged 20–30 and women aged 20–35 all gained it. The material prosperity of the young would be paralleled in a loosening of social and familial controls over them.
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Another study came to the surprising conclusion that the greatest loss of weight among 6,500 male industrial workers was to be found amongst those classified as doing heavy or very heavy labour – the very groups awarded the highest rations. Apparently, the men pooled their ration supplements for their families. In an effort to reverse such trends, factory managers were encouraged to introduce works canteens to make sure that their workers ate a hot meal at lunch. But because the canteens demanded food stamps which could be saved for the family, take-up was low. Only the special ‘Hermann-Göring sandwiches’, doled out during exceptionally long shifts, proved popular because they generally remained off-ration. By the end of 1941, the Ministry of Food suspected that many pits were returning false log-books of miners’ working hours in order to justify providing them.
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On 4 September 1939, a draconian War Economy Decree introduced compulsory Sunday working, froze wages, cut overtime rates and increased taxes. The police presence in factories had to be stepped up immediately. Even before the war broke out, the authorities had been facing a wave of working-class discontent at long working hours. The armaments boom had led to a shortage of labour, making for an overworked and increasingly restless workforce. Coal production had dropped, causing cuts of deliveries to the railways as well as to domestic heating in January 1939. While Nazi surveillance of the shop floor repressed any form of collective action, by the summer of 1939 labour discipline in the heartland of heavy industry in the Ruhr was described as ‘catastrophic’. Workers responded to the new wartime decree by intensifying the kinds of low-level resistance which had already proved effective before the war. Absenteeism – especially on Mondays – rose, as did sickness and refusal to work overtime. The SD urged the regime to make concessions and it did, reversing the wage cuts and restoring bonus payments for overtime and working on Sundays.
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