The German War (50 page)

On 1 April 1942, Martha Rebbien had to move lodgings, after falling out with her landlady on account of her black-marketeering. When the 55-year-old waitress was finally arrested two years later, she did not hesitate to incriminate her former landlady, claiming that she had kept her supplied with food while her husband, a prison warder, had used his contacts to provide ‘coffee, tinned meat and chocolate’. But witness statements and successive interrogations soon revealed a local informal network, encompassing some forty business partners and associates. Most of them were working the local pubs, all within one kilometre of Gesundbrunnen station, one of Berlin’s busiest railway stations and at the heart of a working-class district. Rebbien’s trades usually started with personal contact and conversation, followed by a walk to her home where goods could change hands without witnesses – hence the key role played by her landlady. Despite the breadth of the network, these were small-scale black-market operations, each person responsible for just a few of them. Only one of Rebbien’s contacts, a travelling salesman, turned out to be a serious trader: operating out of a café on the Danziger Strasse, he added a further fourteen contacts to her original cluster of tried and trusted clients.
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This still rather small black market drew on the traditional semi-open, semi-clandestine practices of prostitutes, who made their initial contacts in the same places and relied on familiar neighbourhood networks to glean information and screen outsiders, before taking their clients back to their apartments. The two networks overlapped, thanks to the sex trade’s need to tap into the black market for cosmetics, dresses, hairdressing and medical care (especially in abortions).
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Just as in occupied Europe, those who could went to buy food in the countryside. On Sundays, the suburban railway network was crowded with people willing to trade children’s toys, kitchen utensils, coats, shoes and men’s civilian suits for the eggs, milk, cheese and, above all, meat which were missing from their urban diets. In cities like Ulm and Stuttgart, housewives laid in stocks of useful and unrationed goods such as detergent and glass jars for storing preserves, which they could barter at the farm gate. Already in the summer of 1941, townsfolk in Swabia were preparing for Christmas, paying the farmers in the district of Saulgau up to 20 marks per gosling and a further 40 marks once the goose had grown into a fully fattened bird. The SD monitored some of the barter, noting that in the town of Biberach 10 pounds of strawberries were swapped for a quarter-kilo of coffee beans; French shoes and fabric for fruit and vegetables; and salad oil for cherries. With so many townsfolk coming to them, farmers outside Stuttgart felt less need to sell their produce in the city’s markets.
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In the countryside the patchy surveillance that the police maintained over German towns, cities and railways all but dried up. The authorities remained largely blind to rural trade and were correspondingly cautious about how they enforced the maze of economic regulations in the countryside. One factor which constrained their incursions into closed rural communities was shortage of manpower. For the whole of Württemberg, there were only fifteen gendarmes available at the start of the war to enforce price controls and their number continued to fall, especially after 1941, when replacements for the eastern front were desperately needed. The auxiliary policemen who replaced men sent to the front were unable to investigate cases in detail and so passed their growing caseload on to the prosecutors’ offices, whose staff were facing the same attrition. By mid-1942, violations of the War Economy Decree had become the principal offences brought before the Special Courts, with illegal slaughtering chief amongst them. Yet the police and public prosecutors frequently shrank back from investigations or entered mitigating pleas for lighter sentences, preferring to pursue a softer approach of warnings and exhortations.
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In November 1942, the Stuttgart Special Court travelled out to Rottweil to sit in judgment on a case of illegal slaughter. It involved the mayor of the commune, his 17-year-old son, a police clerk and the local farmers’ leader who, conveniently, doubled up as the local meat inspector. The four defendants were accused of having connived in systematically under-reporting the weight of slaughtered animals, mainly pigs. The meat inspector had used a common trick of recording the weights of the animals without the heads, so that when the heads were added back the equivalent weight of prime meat could be removed. It was virtually impossible to conceal the slaughter of a pig or calf on a farm: it took a butcher and the farmer a whole day to render the carcass, which was usually hung up in the open air of the courtyard. It was therefore much easier to register short-weight than not to register the slaughter at all. The Stuttgart Special Court was given evidence documenting 227 cases for the period of November 1939 to October 1941, during which almost 3,000 kilos of pork had been spirited away. At that point, the police clerk had taken over the weighing operation, allegedly defrauding the depot of 1,170 kilos of pork in just six months until his arrest in March 1942. As the official responsible for logging all cases of slaughter, the mayor had knowingly connived in the practice, employing his teenage son to do the clerical work. The boy was acquitted, on the grounds that he had simply followed his father’s instructions. All three adult defendants were found guilty.

Hermann Cuhorst, the President of the Stuttgart Special Court, was a man with a fearsome reputation. A few days before this case, several people had been beheaded in Stuttgart for violating the War Economy Decree, and a month later a 60-year-old man would be executed for illegal slaughtering and ‘other kinds of trickery’. In the Rottweil case, however, Cuhorst handed down relatively mild prison terms: the police clerk received a ten-month sentence, the farmers’ leader eighteen and the mayor himself, as the senior official, twenty-four months. In April 1942, Hitler had publicly berated the judiciary in a speech to the Reichstag for being too lenient, which may in part explain the ruthless application of the death penalty in a regional capital such as Stuttgart. In a backwater like Rottweil, however, leniency would attract less publicity. The court also had strong motives for not antagonising an entire rural community by executing its leaders. As the judges put it, ‘none of them [the defendants] wanted to break with ingrained, erroneous practice, in order to avoid conflict and strife with the farmers in their commune’. These men ‘were – in a small community in which everyone knows everything [that happens], and where they are mostly related to each other by ties of blood or marriage – obviously in a difficult position in trying to fulfil their official duties when there was a conflict of interests’.
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Such delicacy in enforcing the regulations and softening their draconian terms was by no means unusual in the Württemberg countryside. With its intricate patterns of intermarriage across generations, the village communities in south-western Germany were particularly hard to penetrate. By conceding that local representatives of the Party and state were members of their communities first and foremost, the judges acknowledged that, unless they found mitigating circumstances to justify leniency, the regime risked losing all influence in the countryside. It was easier to reach an accommodation with these communities, long lauded as the true foundation of National Socialism’s policy of ‘blood and soil’, than to combat them.
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The fact that farmers could still meet their delivery quotas and have enough surplus to trade on the black – or grey – market suggests that the SD was right to argue for increasing farmers’ incentives in order to stimulate production. This, after all, was the model that proved so successful in Denmark. The Food Ministry rejected this strategy, however, seeing a system of fixed prices and delivery quotas as the guarantee that the exorbitant inflation and urban famine of the First World War would be avoided. Yet, by tolerating a widespread, if relatively modest, black market in the countryside, the police and courts were tacitly accepting the emergence of a small, illegal economy that did offer price incentives for increasing production once official quotas had been met. In practice, the regime could benefit from this development, without having to acknowledge the widening disjuncture between rhetoric and reality.
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Those who ran the system of food deliveries and rationing were also best placed to subvert it, not just in a Swabian village but across occupied Europe. It is much harder to map the larger-scale operations of the black market than neighbourhood trading, but their outlines are sometimes discernible. In Warsaw, a German edict banned the baking and sale of white bread from as early as 23 January 1940, yet it continued to be openly displayed in the shops and market stalls where Germans also went to buy it for themselves too. The fleet of trucks bringing in white flour each day ran on petrol issued from German-controlled stocks with permits purchased from corrupt officials in the military and civilian administrations. As a major railway junction, Warsaw also served as a fleshpot for German troops on furlough from the eastern front and had a flourishing black market. Not infrequently, the products available revealed the pan-European extent of the deals being brokered with German officials. Just before Christmas 1942, a large amount of poultry suddenly appeared on the city’s markets, no doubt diverted from shipments to Germany. In 1943, news leaked out that herrings, presumably shipped by the Wehrmacht from Norway, were being sold in bulk. Occasionally, it was the goods themselves that revealed something of the scale of the enterprise. In May that year a whole consignment of tortoises sent from Greece or Bulgaria to Germany was offloaded at Warsaw. Though not part of traditional Polish cuisine, they too were sold in street and market stalls throughout the city. For weeks tortoises that had got away were spotted crawling out from behind pillars and edging their way laboriously up steps.
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German civilian administrators, SS officers and ordinary soldiers had celebrated their conquests of 1940 and 1941 by buying up stocks of goods that were hard to come by in the Reich; and so it continued. What impressed one teenage girl was how their table groaned under the weight of luxuries – from almonds and pears to cinnamon, pâté and carrots wrapped in ham – when her father returned from Paris; and then there was the notepaper, sewing materials, stockings, gloves, belts, detergent, shoes, soap and bed-linen that he had also brought home. Marvelling at it all, the teenager reflected that ‘this has become the norm in Germany now. Wherever the men are, there they buy. Whether in Holland, Belgium, France, Greece, the Balkans, Norway, etc.’ As the famished Parisians watched the hordes of German troops staggering under the weight of their luggage at the Gare de l’Est, they nicknamed them ‘potato beetles’.
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In Ukraine, they earned the name ‘hyenas’. Here the plunder began with distributing Jewish property. While tools and simple furnishings were often given to the local populace, anything of greater value was seized. The Higher SS and Police Leader for Central Russia, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, sent 10,000 pairs of children’s socks and 2,000 pairs of children’s gloves via the Reichsführer SS’s personal staff to SS men’s families as Christmas presents. A delegation of Italian Fascists was awed and appalled by their tour of the Minsk opera house, where piles of looted clothes and possessions towered over them. By 1943, German postal censors were noting the way that families were taking advantage of the resources available in the east: a grandfather was urged to send his new boots to Ukraine in exchange for 8 litres of oil, which he could use to barter for a new coat for himself back in the Reich. Ukrainians sold eggs, oil, lard, ham, chickens, peas, butter, sugar, flour, noodles, biscuits, sausage, pearl barley and Persian lambs’ fleeces in return for salt, matches, flints, yeast, old clothes, household utensils, women’s underwear, handbags, graters, cucumber slicers, suspender belts, saccharin, skin cream, nail polish, baking powder, lipstick, toothbrushes and baking soda. Matches were being sold at 6 marks, old suits for 600 marks. A pound of salt would buy a chicken, 10 pounds a sheep, whilst it was apparently not rare for a family in the Reich to acknowledge receipt of shipments of 2,000–3,000 eggs. Germans were sending to Ukraine all their cheap jewellery, tinsel and redundant household items, with men urging their ‘relatives and acquaintances to band together’ to collect these things for barter.
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In a parody of the Nazi language of heroism, one letter-writer remarked how at least ‘in this area extraordinary things have been achieved’, pausing to note how the vacuum left by mass murder was being filled: ‘what the Jews did previously is being pursued in a much more complete form today by the Aryans.’ This was a rare insight and moral condemnation. On the whole, words like ‘racketeer’ and ‘black-marketeer’ were reserved for the black market in Germany; there was no word, pejorative or otherwise, for such activities in occupied Europe. In the west, at least in the first years of occupation, there was a degree of embarrassed self-awareness. The Münster journalist Paulheinz Wantzen noted it in a new joke in 1941: ‘Two Englishmen dressed as German officers were arrested in Belgium as spies. The Germans didn’t pick them out but the Belgians did because they were not carrying suitcases.’ By contrast, the east was there for the taking; and it was only after the goods began to circulate within the German homeland that Germans watched and morally policed one another’s activities.
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Increasingly aware of their dependence on the conquered territories, Germans embraced their new imperial mission with far less eagerness than the material advantages it brought them. By 1942, the media was trying to popularise the idea of a ‘Greater Area’. In May, Hitler addressed the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters again behind closed doors, telling them that ‘our colonial territory is in the east’ and that it would provide coal, grain and oil. The Reich would build a massive new fortified border within which the German population could expand over the next two or three generations to reach 250 million. In public Hitler generally placed the emphasis more firmly on Germany’s war of self-defence, but that same month he also told an audience of 10,000 young officers in the Berlin Sportpalast of the conquest of ‘living space’ in the east and the primary goods it would provide.
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