Authors: Roger Moorhouse
that one of Germany’s most famous battleships, the
Graf Spee
, had
been scuttled in the River Plate that December, after being caught by
a British fleet in the South Atlantic.
As a result, even though Poland had been roundly defeated, few
were minded to see the international situation wholly positively.
Germany’s two primary enemies – the British and the French – were
still in the field, and though hostilities in the west had not yet broken
out, they were popularly considered a formidable military force.
Optimism, therefore, was a rather rare commodity.
With the nation at war, the majority of Berliners naturally rallied
round and, whatever their opinion of Hitler and the Nazis, complied
with the new strictures of rationing and the blackout and supported the
government and the armed forces. Yet, though comparatively rare, dissent
was not entirely absent from the political landscape in the early months
of the war. In fact, Berlin witnessed a resurgence of political protest that
was more marked than elsewhere in the Reich.
Protests mainly took the form of symbolic action. Political graffiti
and anti-Hitler slogans were a favourite – especially if they could be
daubed on a highly visible, moving placard, such as a railway wagon.
Other protesters chose to make more radical statements. In early
November, the Berlin office of Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich
Hoffmann, was targeted, and a shop window containing portraits of
the Führer was smashed.3 More seriously, bomb attacks were carried
out against high-profile targets in the capital. In mid-September, explo-
sive devices detonated outside the Air Ministry and in the entrance to
the police headquarters in Alexanderplatz.4 The perpetrators were never
apprehended, so their precise motives are unclear. But by their actions
they had demonstrated that the Berlin
Volksgemeinschaft
– the national
community – was perhaps not as united as the Nazi leadership would
have liked.
As a result of such tensions, the first Christmas of the war was a
a guarded optimism
53
curious affair. The regime certainly did its best to raise the public’s
spirits, with the usual smattering of festive concerts being staged across
the capital, from a Bach recital in the music school to a performance
by the choir of the
Gross-Berlin
guard regiment.5
Senior Nazis were also obliged to donate at least a little of their
time and energy. Rudolf Hess spoke to the nation by radio that
Christmas Eve, from the naval base at Wilhelmshaven. Goebbels,
meanwhile, was the special guest at a celebration in the Berlin
Theatersaal
. ‘Many children present’, he wrote in his diary, adding opti-
mistically, ‘the public is in good fettle despite all their troubles.’6
Göring’s baby daughter, Edda, also made an appearance, surrounded
by dolls in a Berlin toyshop, where her mother was selecting gifts to
be donated to the children of soldiers killed in the Polish campaign.7
Only Hitler seems to have abdicated his wider festive responsibilities,
repairing quietly instead to the Rhineland, where he visited troops
stationed on the Siegfried Line and enjoyed a Christmas dinner in
Aachen with the motorised regiment of the SS-
Leibstandarte
.8
The public mood that Christmas was a mixture of forced cheer and
depression. Berliners did their best to get into the festive mood, and,
for many, this centred on seeking the right food for the occasion. Those
with contacts, and sufficient funds, would have got hold of a carp –
the traditional Christmas Eve fare – which would be baked or filleted
and fried. For some children, therefore, one of the great excitements
of Christmas was having the live carp swimming in the family bath
for a couple of days, so as to cleanse the fish and keep it fresh. For
the vast majority, however, carp was not on the menu, and the ration
allowance scarcely allowed for any festive spirit.
The situation was not helped by widespread fears that Germany’s
food reserves were not quite as extensive as the Nazi leadership had
claimed. One report, from the underground Social Democratic move-
ment, noted that the Berlin public had expected that the restrictions
of rationing would be loosened slightly in the run-up to Christmas.
When this did not happen – and when the only extra allocations were
rather paltry, amounting only to an additional 125 grams of butter, 125
grams of artificial honey and one egg per consumer per week9 – many
interpreted this as a symptom of a more general malaise. After all, if
the reserves were there, why wouldn’t Göring and Goebbels want to
spread a little Christmas joy?10
54
berlin at war
Others were irritated by the intrusion of the Nazis’ pagan preten-
sions into the traditional ceremonial. The most zealous Nazi supporters
would not celebrate Christmas at all; rather, they would observe
Julfest
, a time to remember their Germanic ancestors and soldiers fallen in
the service of the Fatherland. Even the less ideologically observant
would have noticed the admixture of pagan symbolism, such as tree
decorations or wrapping paper bearing the swastika.11 Traditional
Christmas carols would even have their lyrics altered to excise their
Christian content. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noticed a reworking of the
staple Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’, in a volume entitled
Christmas
in the Third Reich
:
Silent night, Holy night,
All is calm, all is bright.
Only the Chancellor stays on guard
Germany’s future to watch and to ward,
Guiding our nation aright.
Silent night, Holy night,
All is calm, all is bright.
Adolf Hitler is Germany’s star
Showing us greatness and glory afar
Bringing us Germans the might.
It was, she noted bitterly, for a ‘work of art’ such as this, that Stefan
Zweig had to leave the country, ‘for this Heinrich Heine’s poems have
been prohibited for seven years past’.12
Despite such aberrations, some things did not change. Christmas
trees remained a priority, and were eagerly sought across the city. ‘No
matter how tough or rough or pagan a German may be’, William Shirer
noted, ‘he has a childish passion for Christmas trees.’ For some, it
seemed, it became a point of principle to maintain the old trad itions,
in spite of the difficulties of the war. ‘People everywhere’, Shirer noted,
‘are bravely trying to make this Christmas seem like the old ones in the
time of peace.’13 Fortunately, Christmas trees were still plentiful and rela-
tively easy to procure.
Buying gifts for one’s family and friends was more problematic.
Not only was there little leeway for purchases beyond the limits set
a guarded optimism
55
by the ration card, but there was also precious little disposable income
spare for the few luxury goods that were still available. One commen-
tator noted that the restrictions imposed by the rationing had had a
profound effect on people’s buying habits: ‘Germans usually give
wearing apparel and soaps and perfumes and candy to one another
for Christmas’, he wrote,
but this year, with these articles rationed, they must find something
else. In the shops, which are crowded, they were buying today mostly
books, radios, gramophones, records, and jewellery. I tried to buy some
gramophone records for the four secretaries at the
Rundfunk
who have
been most friendly and helpful to me, but found that you could only
buy new records if you turned in your old ones. Having none, I was
out of luck.14
The American William Russell noted in his diary:
[In] Berlin, I had found it almost impossible to buy Christmas presents.
To my closest friends I had given coffee ordered from the free harbour
in Hamburg. A pound of coffee was a princely gift. For my friends at
the Embassy, I had had to search harder. Everywhere in Berlin I met
the same answer – ‘all sold out’.15
For many, therefore, the result was a rather gloomy Christmas, in
which a meagre diet conspired with the blackout and the insecurity
of not knowing the whereabouts of family members, to create an
atmosphere that was remembered as deeply depressing. As one young
Berliner recalled:
That first Christmas of the war was sad. On Christmas Eve, which I
usually couldn’t wait for, I already wanted it all to end. Daddy and
Uncle Willy were somewhere. The Polish campaign had ended long
ago, but we still didn’t know where they were . . . We had received the
last letter from Daddy on the first of December. It said little of interest,
but at least we knew that he was still alive. We didn’t have a Christmas
tree. Mother just sat at the table and knitted a jacket for my little
brother.16
56
berlin at war
William Shirer, ever alert to the public mood, summed up the atmos-
phere:
On many a beautiful night I have walked through the streets of Berlin
on Christmas Eve. There was not a home in the poorest quarter that
did not have its candlelit Christmas tree sparkling cheerfully through
the uncurtained, unshaded window. The Germans feel the difference
tonight. They are glum, depressed, sad.17
The irony was that, for the following few years at least, most Berliners
would look back on the Christmas of 1939 as a time of peace and
plenty.
As winter turned to spring in 1940, the mood in Berlin lifted a little.
Warmer weather and an end to the harsh winter that had plagued the
capital brought Berliners out onto the streets once more. At the week-
ends, people once again flocked to the city’s lakes and parks. Life appeared
to have returned to something approaching normality.
Even so, the public mood was hardly optimistic. The spectre of the
Great War, which had scarred a generation, hung over Germany like a
dark cloud. Once again, Germany was facing her most implacable
enemies. When would the British attack? they wondered. When would
the shadow-boxing give way, once again, to slaughter? As Christabel
Bielenberg noted that spring, ‘We were watching and waiting, they were
watching and waiting, even Hitler seemed to be watching and waiting
– nothing moved. It was as if the bitter relentless cold had seeped its
way into the very fibre of events.’18
Though the Western Front appeared to be calm, other theatres of
war were far from peaceful. On the seas, the tit-for-tat sinking of
merchant vessels and navy ships was accelerating. In February 1940,
five German U-boats had been sunk, while the British had lost two
destroyers,
Exmouth
and
Daring
, and the minesweeper
Sphinx
, as well as numerous merchantmen.
In the air there were even more ominous developments. Most previous
air attacks had been limited to seaborne targets, but in the early months
of 1940 a decisive shift occurred. First, in March, the Luftwaffe launched
an attack on the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow, causing the war’s first
British civilian deaths. In retaliation, the RAF abandoned their previous
a guarded optimism
57
campaign of merely dropping leaflets over Germany. Three days after
the attack on Scapa Flow, British aircraft targeted a German naval base
on the island of Sylt. The first raids on the German mainland were now
only weeks away.
Yet, many still hoped that Hitler could engineer some diplomatic
miracle to wrest peace from the jaws of conflict. The Führer’s benign
public image had suffered some damage the previous autumn, not least
among those few Germans who had seen through the tissue of lies with
which he had attempted to justify the Polish campaign. But, to the
majority of Germans, Hitler was still viewed as ‘a man of peace’. After
all, they would have argued, he had stopped short of war at Munich in
1938 and had left the conference table with most of the concessions that
he had demanded. And, in the years before that – when he had raised
Germany from the ashes of defeat and restored her, proud and inde-
pendent, to the world stage – was that not achieved through diplomacy,
rather than warfare? And when war had finally erupted the previous
autumn, was it not true, they reasoned, that Hitler’s hand had been
forced by the perfidy of the British and the stubborn intransigence of
the Poles? And was it not Hitler who had then offered generous peace
terms to the British after the defeat of Poland?
Yet for all these considerations, the primary concerns for most
Germans during the ‘Phoney War’ were much more mundane,
centring on the restrictions of the rationing system, and their fears
for their brothers, husbands and sons serving in the armed forces.
But despite such undoubted hardships and worries, life continued
much as before. As the American reporter Howard Smith noted, Berlin
in the spring of 1940 was remarkable primarily for its continued order-