The German War (49 page)

But these were exceptions to the silence and passivity which generally blanketed the Continent. Everywhere apart from Denmark the occupation tended to exacerbate pre-existing anti-Semitism. Attempting to ward off German demands for labour and food, let alone hostage-taking and reprisals for ‘terrorist’ acts, Europeans generally put solidarity with the Jews at the end of their list of priorities. For each institution involved there were red lines, things it would not accept. For the Catholic Church in France – whose College of cardinals had proposed taking rights away from Jews before the Vichy government took the initiative – the line was crossed on 1 February 1944 with the conscription of unmarried women for labour in Germany. The Gallican Church’s assembly of cardinals and archbishops publicly condemned this ‘serious attack on family life and the future of our country, on the dignity and moral susceptibility of women and their providential vocation’ – motherhood. The contrast with the Church’s inaction over the deportation of the Jews could not have been more marked. Under German occupation silence was as significant as protest: it signalled concessions that could be made in order to defend what really mattered.
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After the Jews were gone, their fate was not, however, forgotten. In parts of Poland and Ukraine, where crowds had gathered in 1941 and 1942 to watch the round-ups of Jews and acquire the property they left behind, the murder of the Jews soon became a yardstick for measuring their own possible fate. In autumn 1942, SS units returned to the Zamo
district to drive Poles off the land and ‘Germanise’ villages, and the rumour rapidly spread that the Poles would be sent to the gas chambers at Beł
ec or Treblinka, where the district’s Jews had perished months earlier. In the cities of Ukraine, there were similar fears. When Kiev was occupied in September 1941, little sympathy or help had been extended when the Jews were massacred in the ravine of Babi Yar. By April 1942, with no escape from the German blockade of food to the city, a local teacher asked her diary, ‘What can one do, how to live? They probably want to give us a slow death. Obviously it is inconvenient to shoot everybody.’ By early autumn, after a year of German rule, Nartova chronicled what her fellow Kievans were saying: ‘First they finished off the Yids, but they scoff at us for a whole year, they exterminate us every day by the dozens, they’re destroying us in a slow death.’
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While maps of Europe in German classrooms were being covered with little swastikas from the Atlantic to the Caspian Sea, chronic food shortages in the Reich curbed the expression of triumph. By the end of the winter of 1941–42, none of the food requisitioning that Backe was planning for occupied Europe could save German civilians from privation. Rations were cut on 6 April 1942, sharply and across all categories. For the Nazi leadership, which drew a straight line between the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 and the ‘stab in the back’ of November 1918, these were the measures it had most wanted to avoid. Within a week, the SD confirmed that it was indeed the worst single blow to civilian morale in the Reich during the war so far.

In the major cities the SD warned that the ‘provisioning situation’ gave rise to ‘highly critical and sceptical views for the future’. Without doubt, even after weeks of preparatory leaks and rumours, the psychological shock was unprecedented. By the winter of 1941–42, fuel shortages, school closures and wearing layers of clothes to stay warm indoors – all of which had so alarmed people in the first winter of the war – had become commonplace even for a doctor’s family like the Pauluses in Pforzheim. The ration cut was a shock of a different order altogether.
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At a single stroke, 250 grams was lopped off the weekly bread ration. Potatoes and other carbohydrates were meant to offset this, but the cut to proteins and fats was still more drastic. The weekly meat ration fell by 25 per cent for all but those who were doing ‘very heavy labour’. For the category of ‘normal consumers’, which included housewives, the retired and white-collar workers, the meat ration fell from 400 to 300 grams a week. Despite great efforts in the media to point out the positive contrasts to the First World War, playing up the fact that rations allocated to pregnant women, nursing mothers and children had not been reduced, housewives across Germany were complaining loudly that they did not know how to feed their children.
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Although rationing never sank to the catastrophic levels of the First World War and although the system continued to function in most areas until the very end, this did not stop Germans from making the comparison. It was not long before an SD office in the Ruhr warned that ‘in the firms a mood is growing ever stronger which is reminiscent of that in 1918’. Elsewhere, workers were heard talking loudly about how ration cuts would affect their productivity, a clear threat to go slow. Prosecutions for absenteeism and other infractions of labour discipline rose dramatically in the second half of 1942. Shortages also forced women to waste ever more time in shop queues, and employers complained bitterly about the unreliability of their German female workers. Some well-intentioned publicity drives, like the one launched in Württemberg by the Milk and Fat Trades Association urging people to collect beechnuts and extract plant oil, also reminded people of the previous war.
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Since consumers were registered to receive rations at particular grocery and butchers’ stores, they could not shop around freely. Especially in the cities of the Rhineland and Ruhr, queues formed very early in the morning, with reports of 6 a.m., 5 a.m. and even 2 a.m. starts. Occasionally, policemen joined the queues they were meant to be controlling, so that they could obtain goods in short supply, such as fish. In August 1942 the local Nazi Party leader from Castrop-Rauxel warned that ‘if the sale of vegetables etc. continues like it has so far there is a danger that women will one day succumb to rashness which could have ugly consequences’. Rather than emulating the food riots in Paris, Germans dissipated their discontent in a culture of local envy and complaint, as disgruntled shoppers checked that their neighbours were not evading the regulations.
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Long before the ration cuts came into force, war had lost its savour. In Germany, as in Britain, the gradual disappearance of meat, milk, eggs, fresh fruit and vegetables from the diet could be made up in calorific terms by bread and potatoes, until they accounted for over 90 per cent of the daily intake. The quality of the bread deteriorated too. In Britain, the move away from white bread to wholegrain and wheatgerm led to a considerable improvement in nutrition. In Germany, where the bread was traditionally much better, quality declined. By April 1942, virtually none of the bran was being removed from the milling process and the proportions of barley, rye and potato flour being added to the mix had increased. The coarse dough also absorbed far more water, so permitting further economies without reducing the weight of the loaf. People soon began to complain of digestive problems, especially in the south where traditionally more wheaten than rye bread was consumed. Replacing fats, proteins and vitamins with starch and yet more starch had both physical and psychological effects. Health investigators calculated that the first years of war had used up the accumulated fat reserves in urban workers’ bodies. Without making good the losses in fats and essential minerals, a starch-based diet made it impossible to feel full for very long. The official ‘four-fruit jam’ contained increasing amounts of rhubarb, pumpkin and green tomatoes to bulk out the crushed sweepings of fruit. Minimum fat contents of milk, butter and margarine were all reduced.
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As the most plentiful staple, stored in cellars by the hundredweight, potatoes featured in many recipes, from soups and dumplings to sauces. In many cases, potato flour was needed, which involved grating the potatoes into a large bucket by hand, pouring in fresh water and then skimming off the dirty water from the top, before finally scooping out the white potato flour which had settled on the bottom and laying it out to dry on blotting paper. It was a process which could take all day. As sugar became harder to obtain, urban women would offer to help local farmers reap their sugar beet crop in order to receive some of it themselves. The heart-leaves, one young woman recalled, were saved for ‘spinach’, while the straggly outer ones were thoroughly scrubbed before being chopped fine and boiled for hours in a large tub. After they had cooled, a washing press could squeeze a thin brown liquid out of the cooked beet, which then had to be heated again for hours before it finally reduced and thickened into a sweet syrup. Demand for synthetic, chemical flavourings, such as vanilla sugar or lemon and rum essence, increased, and new recipes tried to disguise the endless repetition of the same ingredients and make them go further. ‘Meatballs’ and ‘cutlets’ were fashioned out of potatoes, lentils, turnips and white cabbage. Bored by the monotony of wartime cooking, people became obsessed with recipes and fantasy meals, dining off the memory of a lost ‘golden age’ of plenty.
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From before the war, women had passed on recipes to their daughters for making sweet and savoury preserves and conserves from berries and other fruits, cabbage, carrots, mushrooms and other vegetables, often salted. Kitchen gardens became more important as soon as war broke out, and many miners’ families kept goats or piglets. Although shortage of feed now reduced their number, many households in towns as well as villages went on keeping rabbits and chickens. Even a GP like Ernst Paulus now raised chickens and tended an allotment. Stinging nettles, long collected by the Hitler Youths to make natural remedies, now began to appear in Berlin markets as a vegetable. Families went out to woodlands to collect dandelions for salads, acorns for coffee and camomile, peppermint and lime leaves for tea.
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The black market took on new forms. Butchers and grocers offered an under-the-counter service to favoured customers. A young woman who worked in a pharmacy traded some of its stock of black tea and sweet syrups for meat. Another, employed in the ration card section of the town hall, issued many coupons to her mother and was lucky not to be caught. Working as a clerk in the Charlottenburg ration card office, Elisabeth Hanke soon noticed that in every four-week rationing period there were people who failed to collect their cards in time. Whereas she had to obtain her superior’s permission for withholding ration cards, she needed none to issue them. So she issued the unclaimed ones to herself. One evening, while going for a drink with her colleagues after work, she struck up an acquaintance with an official in the Air Ministry. The two quickly formed an economic partnership: she provided ration cards and he the contraband goods. They soon became lovers too.
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As the criminal police turned to combating the black market, they began to map each district of Berlin, focusing on cafés, pubs, shops and restaurants that were known for trading. Each quarter served its socially distinctive clientele, the elegant bourgeois frequenting the ‘better West End’, while the working-class pubs of Wedding, Neukölln and Spandau catered for their own. Whereas many traders carried out their transactions in the secrecy of the toilets, waiters sold cigarettes openly to diners – no explanation, secrecy or negotiation needed.
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