The German War (12 page)

Winter came early and hard in November 1939, and rail transport promptly collapsed. Overstretched by having to support the campaign in Poland, the evacuation from the Saar and a war economy, the German railways lacked the rolling stock to move coal from the pitheads of the Ruhr. That month the Coal Syndicate of the Rhine and Westphalia was forced to stockpile 1.2 million tonnes of coal. The resulting coal shortage proved so serious that, even in towns near to the Ruhr, firms had to go on to short-time working or start their Christmas break early. Across Germany, people had to wear outdoor clothing at home. Schools – which had only just reopened after serving as military assembly points, after accommodating evacuees and storing the harvest – promptly closed again because they could not be heated. In some cities, crowds gathered outside coal yards and the police had to prevent delivery trucks from being stormed. When the waterways froze in early January, coal barges could not make deliveries in Berlin. With temperatures plummeting to −15°C, the American journalist William Shirer was moved to pity as he watched ‘people carrying a sack of coal home in a baby-carriage or on their shoulders . . . Everyone is grumbling. Nothing like continual cold to lower your morale.’
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As the crisis deepened, local officials began raiding coal trains that passed through their areas, to provide for their populations. The mayor of Glogau, for instance, authorised the unloading of wagons whose ‘axles had over-heated’. Furious at such selfishness, the Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess reminded local Party officials that the rationing system depended on all parts of the country carrying the same burdens. And, by and large, they did. Partly because of the measures instituted before the war in order to rearm, state control of pricing and distribution was far stronger than in the previous war. In the coming years, rationing and especially food distribution would regularly be criticised for being too centralised, inflexible and insensitive to local circumstances – let alone regional culinary traditions – but those criticisms also represented a victory of sorts. Despite crises, local particularism did not overwhelm the rationing system, at least not until early 1945.
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Subsequent winters would produce more coal shortages and ‘coal holidays’ for schoolchildren, but, as people’s expectations adjusted, these would not have the same significance. The first coal crisis of the war reawakened social memories and resentments from the previous war, gripping both state authorities and society at large with the fear of history repeating itself. In the old heartlands of the German labour movement, in cities such as Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bielefeld and Plauen, communist slogans, like ‘Red Front’ and ‘Down with Hitler’, started to appear again. Marxist leaflets – some of them, thanks to the pact with Stalin, Trotskyite in orientation – were found in workplaces or stuffed into letterboxes. In Vienna and Linz, there were reports of renewed propaganda for Austrian independence and the restoration of the Habsburgs. But it was not in Germany and Austria that political discontent spilled out on to the street. That happened in Prague, where a major demonstration took place outside the Gestapo headquarters on 28 October 1939. Elsewhere in the ‘Reich Protectorate’ of Bohemia and Moravia, students and intellectuals held silent protests and vigils. They were broken up by a regime determined to impose order on its non-German subjects. Among German and Austrian ‘national comrades’, however, sarcastic humour and graffiti did not translate into political action. Even socialist émigrés who had hoped for a revolution during the previous six years of Nazi dictatorship had to admit in late October 1939 that revolt was unlikely, concluding instead: ‘Only if famine takes hold and has worn their nerves down, and, above all, if the Western powers succeed in gaining successes in the West and in occupying large portions of German territory, may the time for a revolution begin to ripen.’
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Following the precedent of the previous war the police and welfare authorities were primed for a crisis of juvenile delinquency. By the start of November 1939, the SD was already convinced that ‘clearly the most difficult problem’ for law and order in Germany was the appearance of ‘wayward youths’. Young people of both sexes were flocking to reopened dance halls. In small towns and the countryside, they were drinking and smoking to excess in the taverns and playing cards as if these were ordinary times. In Cologne, ‘more and more young female persons’ were reportedly gathering in front of and inside the main railway station, in order to meet soldiers ‘and in a manner which left no doubt about the eventual point . . . Of ten girls found with men, none of whom was registered with the vice squad, five had a sexual disease.’
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The first signs of ‘wayward youth’ likely to attract the attention of the police, local youth boards and welfare officials were truancy and loitering at street corners. Among girls, this was automatically equated with promiscuity, prostitution and venereal disease; among boys, with theft and an inexorable descent into ‘habitual’ crime. There was nothing uniquely Nazi about these highly resilient – and gendered – motifs of the sexually ‘prematurely mature’ adolescent girl and the thieving teenage boy, joy-riding on stolen bicycles. The same categories of ‘wayward’ behaviour were being used across North America, Western Europe and Australia from the late nineteenth century until well into the 1950s, building a broad consensus that ‘difficult’ children needed to be placed in institutions to save them and society at large from a vicious circle of moral depravity.
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Despite wartime constraints on social spending, the number of children and teenagers sent to reformatories kept rising. By 1941, the number reached 100,000, probably their full capacity, thereby restricting how many young people could be sent to ‘educative’ institutions. Who would be left alone and who would be taken into care remained a lottery, with the odds stacked against the traditional clientele of welfare officials, the children of the urban poor. Most had committed no crime; they were sent for ‘preventive’ purposes, or simply because they were seen as a danger to the community.
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The former Benedictine monastery at Breitenau served as one of Hesse’s harsher reformatories. Set in the rolling countryside of northern Hesse near a bend in the river Fulda, its tall baroque buildings, steeply pitched roofs and enclosed inner courtyard were naturally imposing and forbidding. It was where children and teenagers who had run away from other, more open institutions were sent. On arrival, they went through a similar routine to adult prisoners and workhouse inmates with whom they shared the building – the beggars, vagrants, unemployed and criminals who were given a spell in a workhouse at the end of their prison term to help ‘educate’ them to a life of morality, discipline and hard work before being readmitted to the ‘national community’. Stripped of their clothes and possessions, the children and teenagers were clad in simple browny-grey sackcloth. The working day for everyone was at least eleven to twelve hours. Lateness for work, running away and other infractions were punished by unofficial beatings or, worse, by an officially regulated spell of solitary confinement in the punishment cells or extensions to their sentence.
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Among their number were several girls who had themselves been the victims of sexual abuse. Fourteen-year-old Ronald and his 13-year-old sister Ingeborg were sent for ‘corrective education’ after it became clear that he and his friends had been forcing her to have sex with them over an eighteen-month period. ‘Ronald and Ingeborg’, the judgment read, ‘are already seriously wayward. The father is in the armed forces, the mother has to work. It is therefore not possible to combat the depravity of the children in their parental home and so correctional education must be instituted.’
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Fifteen-year-old Anni N. was sent to Breitenau after giving birth to an illegitimate child in July 1940. She confided to the local woman social worker how her stepfather had come into her bed in the middle of the night and forced himself on her while her mother was asleep in the same room. The male police officials who dealt with her case did not believe her, and the Youth Welfare Board concluded that ‘she does not stay in any employment, she lies and she leads a dissolute life’.
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Anni’s case was only too typical: she had to be taken out of school and off the streets. It was not about helping the victims of sexual abuse but, rather, about protecting their peers from being drawn into the same ‘degenerative’ spiral. Nazi policy worked within an existing set of ideas. Religious conservatives and liberal reformers, jurists and psychologists were all disinclined to accept the testimony of children in sex abuse cases, turning the ‘mendacious’ child into the problem.

In February 1942, the governor of Breitenau advised the Youth Welfare Board in Apolda against placing Anni N. in outside employment too soon: ‘Normally with such girls at least a one-year stint is necessary so that she has a certain fear of being sent here, for only this [fear] can still make her into a useful member of the national community.’ On 1 June 1942 Anni died of tuberculosis. She was not alone. Waltraud Pfeil died within a month of being sent back to Breitenau after attempting to run away to Kassel in the summer of 1942. A few months later, Ruth Felsmann died after serving a two-week spell in solitary confinement. In August 1944, the local hospital in Melsungen found that Lieselotte Schmitz’s weight had dropped from 62 to 38 kilos. Like Anni, she had contracted tuberculosis in Breitenau and died soon after. The fact that teenage girls died as a result of their treatment there testified to an erosion of institutional checks on disciplinary measures typical of the Nazi state. However much the German government worried about the corrosive effect food shortages would have on German civilian morale, the war ended any effective restriction on starving those youngsters who had been taken out of the ‘national community’ and placed in closed institutions.
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Release from corrective education came slowly, via probationary work placements, generally on outlying farms. It was an education in the ethos of hard work, steady behaviour and obedience. In any dispute the farmers and their wives were swift to remind the children and teenagers of their reformatory pasts and to enlist official threats to re-incarcerate them. Girls’ love affairs with soldiers led to tests for venereal disease; boys failing to feed the cows on a Sunday afternoon prompted official warnings for sabotaging the war effort. The stigma of the reformatory clung to them. After being put into care at the age of 12, Lieselotte S. tried to justify herself six years later to a mother she hardly knew:

I was a child at the time I left you and now I’m already grown-up and you don’t know what kind of person I am . . . Forget everything I did to you. I want to make it all up to you. I hereby promise you that I’ll change my ways out of love for you.

Isolated and – rightly – afraid that society was on the side of the experts and administrators, Lieselotte was not at all sure the general social contempt stopped at her own family. For girls like her, the road back into the ‘national community’ depended on diligence, perseverance and not stepping out of line. It was also a reminder to others that belonging had to be earned.

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Throughout Germany, children found that they suddenly enjoyed greater freedom and teenagers were asked to take on more responsibility for watching over younger siblings. As men were called up, women became single parents and struggled with erratic school hours, queued for items in short supply and waited at local government offices. In most families, women also faced growing economic pressure to work. Women took over running family businesses and returned to the classrooms to replace male teachers of military age. Working-class women took up jobs in armaments factories and labour suddenly became scarce in traditional – and badly paid – sectors of female employment, such as agriculture and domestic service.
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Absent fathers could sense that their role as the all-powerful head of the family was diminished with distance. Within a fortnight of the invasion of Poland, the Thuringian cabinetmaker Fritz Probst was exhorting his teenage son, Karl-Heinz, ‘Do your duty too as a German boy is meant to. Work and help where you can and don’t just think of playing now. Think of our soldiers standing before the enemy . . . Then you too can say later: “I contributed to saving our Germany of today from destruction.”’
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Like so many other fathers, Probst knew that he had no direct control over his older son, and his latent conflict with Karl-Heinz soon burst out into the open. Three months into the war, Probst chided him,

Karl-Heinz! You should be a bit ashamed to be so rude to your mother at a time like this. Didn’t I tell you once, I think it was a year ago just before Christmas when Mummy was at the shops, how you must treat your mother? I hope you haven’t forgotten it. And you gave your word of honour that you would always be proper. Have you broken your word? Well, please reply

to this.

Probst advised his wife that ‘a strict upbringing is good for character-building’.
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A self-employed cabinetmaker, he had joined an engineering corps specialising in bridge construction behind the western front. On 19 September, he had been able to write home with some pride: they had just completed their first bridge – 415 metres long and 10 metres wide. He did not know when or how it would be used.

For most Germans the war remained distant. The campaign in Poland had been replaced with months of stalemate in the west. The U-boat campaign against the Royal Naval blockade was the only action to report. In 1914 a news-hungry public had stormed the kiosks, buying up special editions. September 1939 saw the greatest spike in demand for radio receivers, with sales rocketing by 75 per cent compared to a year before, bringing total ownership of private sets up to 13,435,301. Listening to the news became more important than ever, though the lack of action made people worry that the government was keeping bad news from them, especially losses of air and submarine crews. According to the SD, the dearth of information prompted people to complain that they were ‘politically mature enough to deal with negative events and developments’.
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