After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  Leaving aside the humanitarian issue, the failure to feed the Germans, especially during the cruel winter of 1946-7, may have given rise to a deal of negative propaganda. Carl Zuckmayer reported conversations overheard in bread queues in the American Zone: ‘Yes, Hitler was bad, our war was wrong, but now they are doing the same wrong to us, they are all the same, there is no difference, they want to enslave Germany in exactly the same way as Hitler wanted to enslave the Poles, now we are the Jews, the “inferior race”, they are letting us starve intentionally, can’t you see that is their plan, they take away all our sources of income and let us die slowly, the gas chambers worked quicker . . .’112

  Gollancz had noticed this even before the frost set in. ‘Youth is being poisoned and re-nazified: we have all but lost the peace . . .’ he wrote to the editor of the liberal News Chronicle.113 The problem had even broader implications: ‘I should have liked to write about the general decline of public morality under the impact of growing despair and of the financial crisis in which the black and the grey sectors constantly encroach upon the legitimate one . . .’ Gollancz thought German youth had no morality whatsoever, and the situation was not helped by the lackadaisical approach of the British authorities. There was just one monthly youth magazine published by the British, as opposed to nine in the US Zone; and most of those were fortnightly.114

  Clay was profoundly concerned about the lack of subsistence. He noted that the people were receiving just 1,000 calories in the British Zone in February 1946, which would ‘hardly maintain life’. Ernst Jünger, who seemed to receive regular gifts of food from his admirers, reported in March that the rations had sunk to half what they were. ‘This is a death sentence for many who up to now have only been able to keep their heads above water with the greatest effort, above all children, old people and refugees.’115 The US Zone had been up to 1,550, but by 18 March the figure had dropped to 1,313. Germans were better fed in the Soviet Zone. Even when spring returned, the American provision had only risen to 1,275. Without access to black-market supplies no one could live and work. Once again Clay reserved some of his bitterest comments for the French, who applied to him for wheat in January 1946. Without wheat the calorie count in their zone would drop from 1,380 to 1,145. Clay thought they had none because they had taken it all to France. Absence of wheat and the need to make bread had also obliged the French to close the breweries. In February that year Clay gave orders to reopen them in the American Zone.116 On 26 May 1946 he spoke of a ‘nutritional disaster’. Ever the propagandist, he thought it ‘may seriously retard the recovery of Western Europe and probably disturb its political development’. German children under six were suffering from a high incidence of rickets, and children between six and eighteen were often stunted.117

  Many Germans were prepared to see the Allies as liberating angels at first, but they were soon disappointed when they saw the all-too-human soldiers arrive filled with propaganda and hatred for the civilian population. The high-flown rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter now appeared to be every bit as pharisaic as the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson had been.118 The danger of hunger and famine was slow to abate. Gollancz had had faith in the idea of Anglo-American co-operation, but even with the creation of Bizonia the rations were pitifully low. As the cold weather began to set in, on 14 October 1946 the daily intake was only 1,550 calories.119

  Stories abounded like those retailed in Paris during the Commune: dogs and cats were not safe from hungry Germans. Rats and frogs were eaten, together with snails - which made a filling soup. Horse was a relatively common dish, as the beasts often expired by the roadside and were then carved up by the locals with sharp knives. The Germans discovered the nutritious character of certain plants. Nettles were an obvious resource. Flour was made from shoots, rosehips and reed mace (cat’s tail). Acorns, dandelion and lupine roots were ground to make coffee. In Austria to this day they will tell you that their fondness for elderflowers and elderberries dates from that time.120 Wild mushrooms were a great boon in season: they stopped the stomach from rumbling but later tortured the consumer with their indigestibility. Even by the winter of 1948 the situation had not been remedied - the Germans had still to reckon with scanty rations. That winter the Americans brought in supplies of maize. As we have seen, the Germans were not impressed: Hühnerfutter (chicken feed) one man called it; no jolly green giants for them.

  The countryside should have had other uses. Germany was struck by a plague of wild boars after the war, which were in their way as frightening as the marauding gangs of eastern European DPs. The boars gobbled up potatoes and other crops. Farmers armed themselves with bows and arrows because they had been obliged to yield up their guns. Most of them had no way of killing the creatures, which then fell victim to Allied troops, who hunted them for sport, not out of hunger.121

  The situation was made all the more acute by the failures of supply. The potatoes sent from Bavaria in the winter of 1946-7 arrived frozen. Those who had nothing to trade and no power to go out and scavenge fared the worst: of the 700 inmates of the lunatic asylum at Grafenberg bei Düsseldorf, 160 died. At the lowest point of that winter, the daily intake in British Nordrhein-Westfalen was 865 calories. Rumours spread: in Oldenburg the locals thought the Allies were hoarding food in preparation for a new war; or it was said that they were hoping that all the Germans would die, and save them the expense of feeding them. Special ‘hamster’ trains were organised to see if anything could be found out in the country - either by trading with the farmers or simply by scrumping. When rickets appeared in the British Zone, the authorities responded by issuing vigantol and vitimin D2. In Berlin, TB now accounted for one death in ten.122

  Some relief was to be had from the Hoover Diet introduced in the summer of 1947: a 350-calorie meal for children. Former president Herbert Hoover had toured Germany and pronounced that its food situation was the worst in Europe and that its diet was providing the lowest number of calories for a century. He proposed sending over America’s surplus potato production. Suddenly the school meal became the equivalent of a banquet. Germans learned to like peanuts and soya. At the beginning of 1948 there was a twenty-four-hour general strike in Bizonia in protest against the lack of food. 123

  On 17 June 1948 Carl Zuckmayer, now joined by his wife Alice, witnessed a full-scale demonstration from their Munich hotel room. The protesters were several thousand students in their twenties. From loudspeakers they chanted, ‘We want no tyranny from hunger!’ and ‘We have not been colonised!’ The demonstrators wore death’s heads or white clothes painted with skeletons, and dragged coffins and gravestones along behind them. One had a bread-basket containing just a piece of crust; others carried symbols of misery, hunger and death. Other university cities witnessed similar protests that day: three years after the end of the war the people were still starving, and their intellectual hunger was also as yet unassuaged.

  The Zuckmayers found it horribly reminiscent of other demonstrations they had witnessed in the city that had seen the birth of Nazism. In 1933 they had found themselves enmeshed in a pack of brutal Nazi students. They had been lucky to extricate themselves with their lives; and yet these students in 1948 were well brought up and highly intelligent. One of the organisers was a close relative of a member of the Scholl circle - the Weisse Rose. The Zuckmayers watched as armed MPs advanced at them from the Nazi Haus der Kunst, which was now an American officers’ mess. Carl realised that the only way to make the Germans into decent people again was to treat them with kindness.124

  Fringsen

  It wasn’t just the lack of food that killed, it was the extreme cold. In the winter of 1945-6 the coal ran out. Joseph Frings, archbishop of Cologne, addressed the ‘people of the Rhineland’ in his New Year’s Eve homily: ‘We live in times when we have to help ourselves to little things that are necessary to keep ourselves alive and to maintain our health, if we may not obtain them through our work or by requesting them . . . But I believe that in many cases it has gone much further t
han this, and when this happens there is only one solution: to immediately return any property you have no right to own, otherwise God will not forgive you.’125 The people were only too ready to interpret the sermon: if you are going lose your lives by freezing to death, then help yourself to what you need! No one paid much heed to the second part of the paragraph, or indeed to the gist of the sermon. The story of the primate’s condoning of theft spread like wildfire - the Church approved the stealing of coal. In February 1947 a train was stormed in Nuremberg, forcing the police to fire warning shots. On the 26th of that month it was reported that there had been 305 deaths from hypothermia in the Western zones, 1,155 cases had been admitted to hospital and 49,300 people treated for the effects of the cold.126 By March 17,000 people had been arrested for stealing coal since the New Year.127 Frings had come into his own once the war ended. He was the one post-war churchman to originate a verb in German: fringsen - helping yourself (principally to Allied coal) when the troops weren’t looking. It was similar to zapp-zarapp - helping yourself the Russian way. Frings was more a man of the people than the other high churchmen who had won their laurels objecting to Hitler’s policies. He had suffered knocks with the best of them. In June 1943 a bomb had blown up the air-raid shelter he was in, killing two nuns and injuring five others. Frings rolled up his sleeves and helped to rescue the wounded. His own family house was destroyed, killing one of his sisters; a brother was killed during an air attack on Magdeburg; another died in a Russian camp.128

  He had been appointed in May 1942 after his predecessor, Schulte, died in the course of another air-raid. The Nazis had already expressed their view of Frings when they attacked him in his parish, and Peter Winckelnkemper, the ‘brown’ mayor of Cologne, had thrown an ashtray at the priest, scarring his face. Perhaps because he had seen the suffering caused by both sides in the conflict, he was able to speak up for the victims. He stood up first to the Nazis, then to the Allies by rejecting ‘collective guilt’. From his pulpit he called for justice and Christian love from the conquerors; he demanded the liberation of POWs, spoke out against famine and against the expulsions from the east and called for just proceedings in denazification. He also pleaded for the lives of those who had been condemned to death by the Allied courts.129

  At Christmas 1945 he made this clear to his flock. The war was over, but the current situation was one of general suffering: ‘I see it as my duty to relieve your pain as best I might . . . by speaking and writing. I have always made it plain that the whole nation is not guilty, and that many thousand children, old people and mothers are wholly innocent and it is they who now bear the brunt of the suffering in this general misery.’130

  Frat

  As already noted, there was to be no talking to the conquered Germans. ‘Fraternising’ was prohibited before the Western Allies arrived in Germany. The ban was first imposed after the First World War, but then the occupation of Germany had been limited to certain western districts. After the Second World War in some places it remained in force until October 1945, although it was perfectly ineffective.131

  Soldiers were told not to be moved by the hunger of a ‘yellow-haired German child . . . there lurked the Nazi’. In the American army paper Stars and Stripes servicemen were rehearsed in useful slogans: ‘Soldiers wise don’t fraternise.’ A picture showed a comely German girl: ‘Don’t play Samson to her Delilah - She’d like to cut your hair off - at the neck.’ Or quite simply: ‘In heart, body and spirit every German is a Hitler!’132 The British were almost as heartless. The order banning frat was introduced to British forces in March 1945. In his proclamation to the Germans Bernard Montgomery asked them to tell their children ‘why it is the British soldier does not smile’. Very soon, however, Montgomery saw that the ban was unworkable with the children and exempted those under eight. On 12 June soldiers could address any child. The British scrapped the ban altogether in September, but until the following month Germans had to get out of the way of British soldiers on the pavement.133

  In some quarters, the ban on frat was the source of acute frustration among Germans. Ursula von Kardorff heard about the prohibition on 11 June. Soldiers began to shout at the women: ‘We would like to talk to you, but we are not allowed. Eisenhower said so.’ Arthur Radley, a British officer serving in Austria, thought the whole thing ludicrous, but the ban had one unexpected advantage. His regiment had an RSM whom everyone disliked, but they could find no way of getting rid of him. Then, as they were marching into Styria, a girl asked him the time, and he replied. He was put before a court martial and broken to private. He was then transferred to another regiment. ‘A lot of people could breathe again.’134

  On 29 June Clay reported that the ban was ‘extremely unpopular’. It was chiefly a ‘boy-girl problem’. ‘The only fraternisation that really interests the soldiers is going with the pretty German girl, who is very much in evidence.’ He thought the whole thing made for bad propaganda: it should be the American soldier, not the German girl, who wins hearts and minds.135 It was also wholly ineffectual: within a month of the Western Allies’ arrival a German lover became the rule. What the soldiers did when they were alone was fratting. For George Clare, coining a mixed metaphor rather a long time after the event, British soldiers were ‘cementing Anglo-German relations at the grass-roots’. His mess, a large, requisitioned Berlin flat, was ‘liberty hall’: you never went into any bedroom without knocking first. There was a chance there would be a ‘Veronika’ in there. Others went home to the family. One of Clare’s friends shared a bedroom with a woman and her mother. The latter just turned over and went to sleep.136

  Neither Allied soldiers nor German women were ready to co-operate with the ban. Part of the problem was a shortage of the opposite sex. Most German men aged between sixteen and sixty were absent; those who remained were often invalids or cripples. Women aged between twenty and forty outnumbered their men by 160 to 100. Margret Boveri reported four women mobbing a twenty-year-old German youth in Neukölln in Berlin, and recalled the problems that had been caused for her generation by the loss of two million young men in the Great War. The conquerors, by contrast to the old men around, looked healthy and proud, which acted as an aphrodisiac of sorts. For the women themselves, their virtue had been compromised by two things - the experience of rape, often aggravated by violence, disease or pregnancy, and starvation. Clare’s frat, ‘Anita’, was lucky to have been raped just once: she had tried to wriggle out of it by pointing to her groin and saying ‘I sick!’ The Russian was wise to that. ‘I rubber!’ he replied.137 Very soon Clare learned that most if not all of his comrades in arms had adopted ‘Fräuleins’ and that certain nights when the men did not return to their billets were called ‘Fräulein nights’.138

  The way to the Berlin women’s hearts appears to have been through their stomachs. From the Winston Club, British Other Ranks filled their haversacks with spam and cheese rolls, buns and cakes. A haversack filled with NAAFI food had the purchasing power of two cigarettes. You could feed a Fräulein and her family for four Gold Flakes or Players. British soldiers were rationed to 200 cigarettes a week, which made them the lords of the land with full seigniorial rights.139 Morality was loose and prostitution rife. Both the Allies and the German authorities turned a blind eye to it. In Nuremberg one of James Stern’s colleagues interviewed a prostitute. She said most of her customers were sad German soldiers looking for companionship, but there were American soldiers too, ‘both white and coloured’. The AMG had not sought to interfere, but the prostitutes had to register and see a doctor once a week.140

  It was generally not a formal business arrangement in that way. German women were prepared to have sex with Americans for reasons that stretched from companionship to the need for protection, cigarettes, food or stockings. There was a wood in Nuremberg that Stern called ‘Conception Copse’. Between 6 p.m. and the curfew it was littered with GIs and German girls. As frat was still officially banned, they had to beware of MPs. There were, however, plenty of DPs a
cting as auxiliaries to the American forces who had no fear of the police - Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, Letts or Poles - and they too availed themselves of the German girls.141

  13

  Black Market

  Old Reichsmark coins, which weren’t valid any more because of their silver content - we weren’t supposed to have them any more - and Party badges - all badges from Hitler’s time, Hitler Youth badges - with those we went to the [American] barracks and in the barracks we got cigarettes. And the cigarettes we exchanged for food at the farmers.

  Quoted in Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans, New Haven and London 2003, 90

  Cigarettes and CARE Packets

  With a cigarette worth more than a hundred-mark note even the old nobles were happy to make a little money smuggling cigarettes across the green frontier. An American cigarette was worth a suburban railway ticket, and a packet counted as a major bribe. In October 1945, one cigarette was worth four ounces of bread. In a POW camp they could cost as much as 120 marks a piece.1 The Germans who were best off were those who could still lay their hands on jewellery, watches or cameras. Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein remembered selling a badly damaged piece of Meissen porcelain to a black-marketeer for a considerable number of cigarettes. The piece was restored and sold to an American general’s wife who kept it too close to the fire and the restored part promptly fell off.2