The German War (70 page)

Much of this imbalance in purchasing power stemmed from the elaborate system of subsidies and payments devised by central government and first applied to the Saar evacuees in 1939. The Nazi regime created payments under the heading of ‘evacuee family support’ in order to ease the additional costs incurred by families: for travel and transport, replacing furniture and other household items, the loss of income from evacuation, or the extra cost of running a second home in cases where the husband was still living in the city. All these costs could be factored into calculations of financial entitlement. As the state strove to make evacuation work, having to eat out or buy meals in became defrayable expenses alongside journeys home to place belongings in safe storage. As many people availed themselves of the opportunity – a chance also to see friends and relatives and take stock of conditions in their home towns – the railway network buckled under the additional load.
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The scale of resources being paid out by the state reflated – perhaps even inflated – local, rural economies, with regional price control commissions setting rates for rent, cooking facilities, heating and bedding in order to provide incentives for locals to take in evacuees. Intent on equipping the ‘national community’ with the means to face the test of the bombing war, the regime issued no fewer than thirty-nine directives and amendments to regulate the ‘evacuee family support’. Calculations became so complex that municipal authorities issued multiple model examples for a mother with four children to show how the payments varied depending on whether the father was in the military, worked in a reserved occupation or was deceased. Minor discrepancies between the levels of entitlement fuelled envy and jibes, while in fact the sums being paid out were almost as great as, and in some cases greater than, the breadwinner’s peacetime earnings.
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Using the male breadwinner’s wages as a yardstick was designed to preserve the pre-war social order. As with the payment of ‘family supplements’ to the wives of soldiers, such massive spending by the state was designed not to dislodge existing distinctions of pay, class and rank, but to leave them intact without causing hardship. This was not egalitarian social welfare; nor was it targeted at either individuals or communities. Rather, as Nazi policy quietly replaced its expectations of spontaneous communal solidarity with state provision, it put the family at the centre of welfare.
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In other respects, the family remained an obstacle to those like Goebbels, Albert Speer and the SD who would have liked to institute a simple, compulsory system of evacuation. As it was a power Hitler never granted them, local authorities were forced to persuade parents to sanction the evacuation of their children. Party officials soon found that meetings with parents were most successful when they were conducted by an experienced teacher or head teacher who already commanded local respect. Despite a great deal of effort, however, parents did not always give their consent and local Party and Education Ministry officials often had to put pressure on them to comply. When the schools were closed and evacuated wholesale to the countryside in the early autumn of 1943, recalcitrant parents were warned that they remained legally liable for sending their children to school. Many families complied, but others sent their children to out-of-town schools. In Goebbels’s own Gau of Berlin, some children travelled as far as Oranienburg to attend the schools there or boarded with foster families in nearby towns like Nauen.
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Parents were not slow to enforce their rights. On 11 October 1943, 300 women protested vehemently at the municipal offices in Witten, demanding that ration cards be issued to their children and themselves. In an effort to stem the return of children, the Gauleiter and Reich Defence Commissioner for South Westphalia, Albert Hoffmann, had ordered that ration cards should be withheld from those who lacked serious reasons for coming home. When the police arrived on the scene, they refused to intervene, pointing out that the mothers were ‘in the right’ and that there ‘was no legal basis’ for withholding their ration cards. Similar scenes unfolded at the municipal provisioning offices in Hamm, Bochum and Lünen. Mothers brought their toddlers and babies with them. Some of their coal-miner husbands also came, and threatened to stage a sit-in until the ration cards were issued. Since evacuation remained voluntary, the authorities had to give way.
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The presence or absence of their husbands made a big difference to women’s choices at this time. After the firestorm, men from Hamburg serving in the Wehrmacht were anxious for their wives and children to leave the city, while most of those who came back had husbands working there who wanted their wives to return. Then there were the women who were prevented by their reserved occupations from leaving at all. In Munich, working mothers petitioned, demanding the same liberty to go as women who were not working. Others simply upped and left, exacerbating the chronic shortage of labour in the war industries. In August 1944, the Plenipotentiary for Labour, Fritz Sauckel, stipulated that children and infants should be allowed to go in order to safeguard these ‘bearers of the German future’, but that mothers of children of over 1 year old would have to stay, unless the employer gave them permission to leave. While Goebbels officially upheld the letter of the regulations which entitled the authorities to refuse to register women for rations and accommodation who did not have a valid departure permit, he clearly lacked the appetite for a battle with mothers who had accompanied their small children. Instead, he proposed a face-saving gesture, making them liable for labour service in their new place of evacuation.
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To compensate for absent housewives in the increasingly empty cities, the Nazi Women’s Organisation ordered its local sections to provide meals and home help for grass widowers, while the press carried simple recipes for men as well as practical tips on how to sew and mend. Across the denuded cities of the Reich, works canteens, which had proved so unpopular to the family-minded industrial workers in the early years of the war, gained ground rapidly. By providing hot meals and shelter, workplaces were becoming a kind of substitute home.
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By early 1944, the whole model of evacuation underwent a fundamental rethink. The grand scheme that Goebbels’s Interministerial Committee for Air War Damages had devised a year earlier had divided the Reich into ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ regions. This had proved unworkable, as ‘receiving’ areas were swamped by successive waves of evacuees. Goebbels now began trying to limit evacuation itself, by restricting it to large cities which appeared particularly at risk. In fact, the evidence showed that many people would do everything they could to remain in or near their home town. In Ludwigshafen, the special trains and chartered buses had stood empty for days after heavy bombing while people tried to rescue property and find alternative housing within the city – in school halls, cellars, the basements of offices, or in the bunkers themselves. After the June and July 1943 raids on Cologne, Gauleiter Josef Grohé reported that most of the 300,000 people who had left the city were staying in the nearby countryside, with many still clinging to the idea of setting up some kind of abode in Cologne – ‘be it a cellar room or an allotment garden shed’. In the same spirit, Grohé permitted evacuees from the neighbouring Gau of Düsseldorf to stay in his region rather than moving them on, as planned, to Thuringia, Kärnten and Württemberg.
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By the winter of 1943–44, such ad hoc local measures were becoming the basis of a different model of evacuation, and the
Reichsbahn
was encouraged to ferry commuters travelling short distances and link up with local bus and tram networks. The railways – already buckling under the trans-European demands of conveying military transports, war materiel, evacuees, forced labour convoys, food shipments and Jews – engaged in another round of planning and improvisation. Cattle trucks were refitted as commuter carriages: with their wooden benches, light bulbs and pot-bellied stoves, they became carriage model MCi 43. Commuting soon provided a new source of envy and dispute: were evacuees who continued to come to work in the city from the surrounding countryside entitled to the special ration supplements issued to pep up those who were living in the bombed cities? In Mannheim, these special allowances included a bottle of wine, 50 grams of real coffee beans, cigarettes, as well as half a pound of veal or a pound of apple purée. The issue was referred all the way to the Reich Chancellery before a negative decision was reached. Naturally, some zealous citizens took it on themselves to inform on neighbours they thought were cheating.
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Such lack of ‘organic solidarity’ not only challenged the Nazi ideal of the ‘national community’. It also challenges the schemas of historians who divide between those who see the regime as a ‘consensual dictatorship’ and those who depict a regime pitted against growing defeatism and social opposition. For all their differences, both of these concepts suffer from the same flaw: they imagine that German society as a whole either supported or opposed the regime. The collective protest of the coal miners’ wives in Witten – to demand their children’s ration cards – was highly unusual. And even in this case, they expected the state to abide by the law and recognise the justice of their claims, as it indeed did. Most kinds of wartime social conflict were not directed against the authorities at all. Instead, people generally wanted the authorities to step in and put other categories of ‘national comrades’, whom they accused of behaving unfairly, firmly in their place. As the demand for places in Germany’s bunkers grew, people in war work began to challenge the principle that mothers with children had first claim on access: petitioners pointed out that, whereas they had no choice themselves, women with children ought already to have left for the safety of evacuation. Göring’s ‘chivalrous’ ruling in favour of women and children remained in force, however. The pattern was similar elsewhere. Rising demand for cinema tickets generated complaints about ticket-touting, advance queuing and whether enough seats had been reserved for soldiers on leave. As each constituency petitioned the authorities about the unfairness to which it felt exposed, the professional magazine the
Film-Kurier
commented that ‘There is no shortage of attempts to help every national comrade get his rights.’
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With their petitions, complaints and occasional denunciations, Germans drew the authorities into their conflicts with one another, expecting them to impose a ‘fair’ solution. This pattern of behaviour gave the notion of a ‘national community’ a certain legitimacy, because it provided the framework for staking a claim – just as it automatically excluded Jews, Poles and other foreigners. At the same time, the increasing bitterness of complaints and apparent pettiness of conflicts amongst Germans tells of a beleaguered nation which rarely felt like a ‘national people’s community’ and made the more grandiose claims of propagandists ring hollow. But this did not mean that society had become ‘atomised’: family ties, religious congregations, professional networks and circles of friendship continued to function, as did communities based on apartment block, urban neighbourhood or village. As expectations of spontaneous ‘national solidarity’ were progressively disappointed, people became more conscious of the immediate, everyday communities on which they could draw.

German society was still held together on the national level by the voluntary mass organisations like the Air Raid Defence League and the People’s Welfare, by the churches and the Party, all of whom had to work at bridging the new social conflicts caused by bombing, homelessness and evacuation. All this produced ambivalent responses to Nazism. Hitler had stopped speaking often in public and seemed too distant to impinge on daily life. Goebbels, whose sexual adventures and mendacious propaganda furnished material for many jokes, was widely admired for visiting bombed neighbourhoods of Berlin each night and for rallying the population. Local leaders were judged on their appearance – with tales of corruption, crass luxury or crude behaviour colouring jokes about the ‘
Bonzen
’ – the ‘big shots’ – while most Germans imagined themselves, by contrast, as ‘little’ people. But most of the structures of the Nazi regime simply seemed normal – down to the urban sub-camps for concentration camp prisoners who worked to clear bomb sites. The Party-state, in all its local manifestations, remained a primary source of rights, entitlements and racial privileges, whether dispensed by the volunteers of the NSV or the municipal ration card offices. Efforts at change focused on improving one’s lot within the scale of ration supplements or simply finding the woman in the department store who had control over the scarce supply of winter coats.

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The thirst for private, non-political entertainment was irrepressible. People might turn to the Party, the Führer or the churches on key ritual occasions such as memorial services for the victims of bombing or annual events like Heroes’ Memorial Day or Hitler’s New Year’s Day addresses. But for years people had tried to cope with the burdens of war through private, non-political means. The first radio programme with a mass following of this kind had been the
Request Concert for the Wehrmacht.
On 31 December 1939, the Vienna Philharmonic gave their first New Year’s Eve concert of Strauss waltzes to raise money for the Party’s Winter Relief charity. Performed under the baton of their long-standing conductor, Clemens Krauss, the concert proved such success that, a year later, it was moved to New Year’s Day and broadcast live across the Reich.
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As the battle for German morale entered this key phase, the search for personal, private fulfilment became more intense. When the Marburg writer Lisa de Boor visited the capital in April 1944, she was amazed to find the undamaged cinemas in the Kurfürstendamm opening at 11.30 in the morning to full houses. The film to see in the winter of 1943–44,
The White Dream,
was an escapist musical on the ice rink, its hit song ‘Go buy a coloured balloon / and hold it in your hand / imagine it carries you off / into a strange fairytale land’. By the autumn of 1943, even the newsreels shied away from coverage of the front, prefering to dwell on what the SD called ‘peacetime matters’ such as sports, trivia and current events.
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