The Third Reich at War (75 page)

Problems of this kind led many women to take their children back to their home towns, a move which the authorities tried to discourage by ordering that their ration cards would not be accepted there. As a result, 300 women staged an open, public demonstration in the industrial town of Witten, near Dortmund, on 11 October 1943, and the police had to be called in to restore order. On arriving at the scene, however, the police refused to do anything since they were persuaded that the women were right to protest. Similar, if less dramatic scenes, took place elsewhere in the Ruhr. ‘The abuse of official and leading persons,’ the report noted in a shocked tone, ‘was on the agenda.’
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One woman was reported as saying, in an obvious allusion to the fate of German Jews: ‘Why don’t you just send us to Russia, turn machine-guns on us, and polish us off?’
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People wanted their houses to be repaired as quickly as possible, or new ones built.
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But this was scarcely possible, given the scale of the damage. Some officials, like the Regional Leader of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann, urged the deportation of Jews to make more dwellings available for people who had lost their homes in the bombing, but the Jewish minority in Germany was so small - it had never been more than 1 per cent of the population even at its height - that, although this opportunity was indeed used, among others by Albert Speer in his search for accommodation for his workers, it was in no way enough even to make a small dent in the problem. Local authorities made plans to build emergency accommodation, including quick-to-build two-storey wooden barracks, but these fell foul of the official prioritization of war-industrial construction. On 9 September 1943 Hitler issued a decree setting up a ‘German Housing Aid’ under Robert Ley, and the regime provided grants for the erection of prefabricated barracks, some of which were constructed by Jewish concentration camp prisoners. But these made little impact either. By March 1944 an official estimate put the number of homeless at 1.9 million, needing a total of 657,000 new dwellings. By the end of July 1944 only 53,000 had been built. Some employers provided simple new accommodation for their German workers, but even this was very limited in scale. Visiting Bochum in December 1944, Goebbels noted that the city still had 100,000 inhabitants dwelling there, then corrected himself: ‘it’s too much to say “dwelling”; they’re camping out in cellars and holes in the ground’.
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Goebbels himself had played an increasingly important role in dealing with air raids since his appointment by Hitler as Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Bomb Damage Committee in January 1943. This gave him wide-ranging powers to send emergency aid into stricken cities, including for example even the confiscation of army camps to provide temporary accommodation for people who had lost their homes. When an air raid on Kassel on 22 October 1943 created a huge firestorm that rendered 63 per cent of the town’s houses and flats uninhabitable, Goebbels sent in a team that reported almost immediately that the local Party boss Karl Weinrich was completely unable to deal with the situation. At Goebbels’s request, Weinrich was soon after retired on health grounds. The experience prompted Goebbels to persuade Hitler to set up a Reich Inspectorate for Civil Air War Measures on 10 December 1943, with himself in charge. All of this allowed him to criticize Party officials he did not like, and use his influence to override them or even get them replaced. But of course he never achieved total control over this area; in some ways, indeed, it only brought him up against other powerful figures such as G̈ring, who controlled civil defence, and Himmler, who was in charge of the police and fire services. Unexploded bombs, of which there were many, were dealt with by the Reich Ministry of Justice, which, following an order issued by Hitler in October 1940, sent prisoners from state penal institutions to try to defuse them. By July 1942, as the Ministry told Hitler, they had already defused more than 3,000 bombs; this number increased dramatically as the raids intensified in the following months. The death rate among the prisoners engaged in this work was around 50 per cent. For those who survived, the promise of a remission of their sentence that had inveigled many of them into agreeing to serve in bomb disposal never materialized. Many other emergency measures following major air raids lay in the hands of the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization, which ferried in field-kitchens to provide people with food, helped sometimes by the army. The war transformed the organization into a rescue operation, dealing with the effects of total war, placing evacuees, caring for the old, finding homes for orphans, setting up a finding service for missing children, and much more besides. Over a million volunteers were working for it and the closely allied German Red Cross by 1944. It had successfully eliminated the competition of Church welfare groups.
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But it still had a rival in the Nazi women’s organization, which also played its part in caring for bombed-out families with children.
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The Nazi Party Regional Leaders were empowered to raise ration allocations and distribute extra food supplies as well as issuing substitute ration cards to those who had lost theirs in a raid. Supplies were often short, however, and the demand for cooking utensils and other domestic goods ran up against shortages of materials and the higher priority given to war production. The financial compensation paid by the government (according to two decrees issued in November 1940) to bombed-out people to allow them to rent new accommodation and replace essential household items was strictly limited in scope.
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Nor did it prove easy to boost the provision of air-raid protection facilities to the desired level. Despite frequent inspections by senior Party officials like Karl Kaufmann, Regional Leader of Hamburg (who severely criticized the lack of bunkers on an inspection tour of Dresden in January 1945), little was done to improve matters as a result. Hitler had originally planned the construction of up to 2,000 bomb-proof bunkers at the end of September 1940, and by the end of August 1943 over 1,700 had been completed. At the height of the construction programme in Berlin, in the middle of 1941, more than 22,000 workers were engaged on building bunkers in the capital city, many of them foreign forced labourers. But of course even 2,000 was a pathetically tiny number for the protection of Germany’s large urban population. Concrete was needed for U-boat bases, labour for the arms industry and the West Wall, transport for arms-related materials, money to build planes and tanks. In consequence, those bunkers that were completed, particularly the thick-walled, reinforced-concrete structures built above ground, became desperately overcrowded when there was a raid - 5,000 people crammed into a bunker in Hamburg-Harburg early in 1945 that had been built to accommodate 1,200, for example. In small towns as in large cities, air-raid protection was only available for a fraction of the population - 1,200 people out of a population of 38,400 in L̈denscheid, for instance, or 4,000 out of a population of 25,100 in Soest. People began to complain as early as 1943 that the regime had done nothing to build them when money, men and materials were ready to hand, early in the war. Rumours soon became rife that Party bosses had constructed their own private bunkers, as the Saxon Regional Leader Martin Mutschmann had done with SS pioneer labour beneath his private villa in Dresden - the only bomb-proof air-raid shelter in the entire city. The most spectacular of these was of course Hitler’s own bunker complex beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. An air-raid shelter had existed there since 1936, but early in 1943 a vast extension programme was undertaken. Consisting of two floors located 40 feet below the surface, and protected by a reinforced concrete roof some 12 feet thick, it had its own diesel generator used to provide heating and lighting and pump water in and waste matter out. Its construction by the Essen firm of Hochtief, together with that of the command bunker in Hitler’s field headquarters and the underground headquarters complex at Ohrdruf in Thuringia, had consumed more concrete and used up more labour (28,000 men in all) than the entire public programme of civil defence bunker construction for the whole of Germany in the years 1943 and 1944 put together.
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People’s lives in Germany’s towns and cities during the second half of the war were increasingly lived for much, even most, of the time in air-raid shelters, bunkers and cellars, as Goebbels’s comments on Bochum suggested. Air-raid warnings sent people scurrying into them with growing frequency, day and night. In M̈nster, for example, the sirens sounded 209 times in 1943 and 329 in 1944; in the latter year, no fewer than 231 of these alarms were sounded during the day. And in the first three months of 1945 the town’s air-raid warnings went off on 293 occasions, more than in the whole of 1943. Other towns and cities had similar experiences. The disruption to people’s daily lives, to their sleep, to the economy, was enormous and in the final months of the war in many places it became almost unbearable. People tried to relieve the tension with jokes: ‘ “Whom do we have to thank for the night-fighters?” “Hermann G̈ring.” “For the whole air force?” “Hermann G̈ring.” “Upon whose orders did Hermann G̈ring do all this?” “On the orders of the Leader!” “Where would we all be if it were not for Hermann G̈ring and the Leader?” “In our beds!” ’
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As the enemy armies advanced through occupied Europe in 1944-5, German advance radar stations fell silent, and the interval between air-raid alarms and the start of bombing raids grew ever briefer. People began to panic, rushing into the shelters in wild disorder; increasingly, there were injuries and even deaths in the crush. In January 1944, indeed, thirty people were trampled to death in the scramble to get into a bunker at the Hermannplatz in Berlin; the following November, thirty-five people were killed in similar circumstances in the town of Wanne-Eickel.
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Those who stayed in their own homes placed bags of sand and buckets of water in position to try to put out fires caused by bombs. They knew well enough that there was no protection against a direct hit. Cellar walls were broken through to allow escape into a neighbouring house in case a bomb fell on their own. One diarist described a night in his air-raid cellar during a raid in the following terms:

To begin with, a series of incendiary bombs fell in our vicinity. Then there came detonation after detonation, heavy, heavy explosions. Since we don’t have a deep cellar, we crouched on the floor, on mats, near the hole that we had broken through [for escape purposes, into the next house, as required in regulations]. Everyone had a wet cloth wound round their head, a gas-mask on their arm, matches in their pocket, and a wet towel that we placed over our face on the command ‘attention!’ that signalled the audible approach of heavy bombs, pressing it down with our thumbs and little fingers over our mouths and nostrils so that our eyes, also closed, and our mouths were protected against air-pressure and mortar-dust. Although no high-explosive bombs or mines fell on to our street, the walls still shook worryingly. The lights went out, and we lit our lanterns. There was a noise of breaking glass and falling tiles, window-frames etc. We expected to find nothing more than rubble in the house. There was a penetrating smell of fire.
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In the public shelters, admittance and behaviour were carefully regulated and controlled by air-raid wardens, but in the last phase of the war, the rules were increasingly disregarded. They were supposed to be for people who had none in their own homes, and Jews and Gypsies were not allowed to enter them. In 1944 Goebbels ordered that priority had to be given to workers in vital war industries. People entering a public shelter had to show an admission card. By the second half of 1943 few paid much attention to such rules. People crowded indiscriminately into the bunkers, where ventilation facilities devised for only a few soon proved inadequate, the fetid air made people sweat, scabies and other dirt-related diseases and infestations spread, and people began to lose all sense of order, as one sanitary officer in Hamm noted in January 1945: ‘They are grabbing at other people’s possessions, they don’t respect women and children, any sense of order or cleanliness disappears. People who were otherwise well groomed don’t bother to wash themselves or comb their hair all day . . . In the bunkers they don’t go to the toilets any more but just relieve themselves in the dark, in the corners of the room.’
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Meanwhile, above ground, the police struggled to restore order in the aftermath of major bombing raids. Dangerous ruins were sealed off, streets cleared, bodies collected, if possible identified, and buried, sometimes just wrapped in paper, in mass graves: although Hitler had forbidden this, it was impractical in most cases to do anything else, since the numbers of corpses far exceeded the capacity of cemeteries to take them, and religious objections to cremation over the years meant that facilities were not available to incinerate them. People left messages for missing relatives chalked up on the walls of their ruined houses, in the hope that they might still be alive. People’s possessions lay everywhere in the wreckage: beds, furniture, pots and pans, clothes, jars and cans of food, and everything imaginable besides. Special detachments went around collecting them and took them to depots for storage until their owners, if they were still alive, reclaimed them: in Cologne alone there were 150 such depots, most of which were subsequently themselves destroyed in air raids.
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In this situation, with desperate and dispossessed people roaming the streets, the temptation to help oneself to some of these goods was often overwhelming. The penalties for those who were caught were severe. A decree issued on 5 September 1939 against ‘national pests’ (
Volksschädlinge
) prescribed death for theft under cover of the blackout. As a Hamburg newspaper noted on 19 August 1943, not long after the great air raids on the city,