Authors: Roger Moorhouse
memory. With little respite, winter would hold the continent in its icy
grip well into the spring. Germany’s waterways, from the smallest
canals and lakes to the greatest arterial rivers, froze solid. The Danube
was impassable for most of its length; the Rhine, Elbe and Oder were
also blocked with ice. Road and rail traffic ground to a halt.
The German capital was also grievously affected. Temperatures
regularly fell as low as minus 20ºC reaching an absolute low point of
minus 22.5ºC in mid-January.1 For many, however, it was not the
extremes, rather the duration of the cold that was most trying. For
days on end, daytime temperatures struggled to rise above minus 5°C
and night-time would generally bring with it a further 10° drop.
Snowfalls, too, were substantial, with as much as three feet of snow
falling on a number of occasions. Initially, the sudden irruption of
winter had been greeted with considerable enthusiasm. The capital’s
waterways were transformed into impromptu skating rinks; its
numerous parks became playgrounds for skiing and sledding. As
William Shirer noted that January:
you would have found it difficult to believe that a great war was on
. . . The streets and parks are covered deep with snow now, and in the
Tiergarten . . . there were thousands of people this afternoon, old and
young, tobogganing on the knolls and skating on the ponds. The place
was a paradise for children, and they were in the park in droves.2
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75
At around the same time a marathon ski course was marked out
in the city’s forests and parks, in preparation for a race that was to be
open to all-comers. Yet it seems the exuberance of the Berlin popu-
lace was to be the event’s undoing. As competitors began to lose their
way in the woods, it became obvious that many of the marker posts
and direction flags had been removed by mischievous spectators. The
race had to be abandoned.3
Despite such apparent levity, reality soon bit. Travel in the capital
became impossible, with railway points freezing and snow piling high
on the city streets. Berlin’s authorities reacted as best they could. A
strict emergency snow removal programme was instituted, with all
home owners being required to clear and grit the pavements outside
their property before 6.00 a.m.4 In addition, snow-shovelling gangs
were mobilised, consisting mainly of press-ganged residents, Hitler
Youths and the city’s Jews, whose task it was to keep all other streets
and pavements as clear as was possible.5
Official placards were posted in the capital, proclaiming optimis-
tically: ‘NOBODY SHALL HUNGER OR FREEZE’. Yet as far as the
last word was concerned, that is precisely what happened. In mid-
January, a man was found frozen to death on a Berlin street – the first
such casualty for over ten years.6 He would not be the last. The capital’s
wits quipped that even freezing to death was
verboten
now. Others
suggested that Germany’s new allies, the Russians, had thrown in the
Siberian weather, gratis, along with the friendship pact of the previous
autumn.7 Most, however, were simply too cold to see the funny side.
In such conditions, the most immediate difficulty the city faced was
a lack of coal. Germany’s coal supplies were either stranded, en route,
on the frozen waterways of central Europe or else sitting in the para-
lysed railway sidings. The urban centres were the first to feel the pinch.
And, as the supply collapsed entirely that January, even those who had
managed to put aside small amounts of fuel for the winter found their
reserves swiftly exhausted.
On 11 January the crisis came to a head when the city authorities
invited Berliners to come and collect the remaining coal reserves, piled
up in the rail yards. As William Shirer recalled: ‘This afternoon, you saw
the precious coal being hauled through the streets in every imagin able
kind of vehicle – street-cars, private autos, horse-carts, even in wheel-
barrows.’8 Another eyewitness recorded, ‘it got to be a common sight to
76
berlin at war
see an old man of seventy-five or eighty years trudging along the streets
with a heavy coal sack slung over his shoulder. Beside him usually walked
a youngster pulling a toy wagon full of lumps of coal.’9
After the dwindling reserves had been distributed, most of Berlin’s
coal merchants simply hung out a sign saying ‘sold out’ and closed their
doors. Some of them would not be resupplied for well over a month.10
The authorities attempted to make the most of what little coal remained.
Berlin’s schools, for example, were ordered to surrender any coal supplies
that they had managed to stockpile. Fourteen days’ supply was con -
sidered an adequate reserve; anything beyond that had to be surrendered
for redistribution to the civilian population.11 Churches, meanwhile, were
instructed to return all coal to their distributors, as all places of worship
were to remain unheated until further notice.12 All factories not engaged
in war production, moreover, were informed that they would receive
no coal at all.13 Most controversially, the city authorities decreed that all
domestic central heating boilers were to be switched off and that hot
water was only to be made available at the weekends.14
The lack of fuel meant that many buildings and businesses across
the capital were forced to close. The University, for instance, closed
its doors from mid-afternoon; the Technical High School, meanwhile,
closed completely, as did Berlin’s City Library. Many beer halls, cafés,
restaurants and theatres followed suit. Countless factories closed their
doors, while some offices generously permitted their employees to
take work home with them. Schools opened, when at all, for only a
couple of hours a day, long enough for homework to be collected and
new assignments to be set.15
Berliners had to survive as best they could. The worst affected were
those – estimated at as many as one in four of the city’s population
– who had to endure that winter with no heating at all.16 In such
households, water supplies would freeze solid and thick crusts of ice
would form on the inside of the windows. A report by the security
service of the SS, the
Sicherheitsdienst
, or SD, noted one such flat in
the Berlin suburbs, in which the temperature dropped to minus 10°C.17
Most Berliners were not so badly affected and were able, at the very
least, to heat a single room. Yet they too became, in effect, refugees
within their own homes, huddled around whatever meagre source of
warmth they could muster. Some sought out long-neglected electric
heaters. Others used a stove or oven, ignoring the official instruction
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77
that kitchen appliances were to be used exclusively for cooking. Those
with a grate in their apartment and a sense of adventure could forage
for firewood in the city’s parks and forests. When those supplies ran
out, they would have to consider sacrificing items of furniture.
Many simply resorted to wearing their winter clothing indoors. One
diarist visited a friend that January and found her sporting a fur coat
and gloves, trying to keep warm by the kitchen stove.18 The city’s
contingent of journalists faced particular difficulties in this respect.
Fred Oechsner, correspondent for United Press, and newly arrived in
Berlin that January, recalled the struggle of trying to type wearing
gloves while sitting ‘half-frozen, muffled in overcoats, woollen scarves,
several pairs of socks and innumerable pullovers’.19 William Shirer,
meanwhile, found that his room at the prestigious Adlon Hotel – with
its constant supply of hot water – soon became a haven for journal-
ists who were unable to work in the severe weather:
an American correspondent came to my room to get warm – we still
have heat in my hotel. He said he’d kept dipping his hands all morning
in a pan of warm water on his kitchen stove. It was the only way he
could keep his fingers warm enough to typewrite his dispatch. He didn’t
realise you’re not supposed to heat water except at weekends.20
With the restriction on domestic water heating, Berliners found that
they now had to live without regular washing as well. Twenty-three-
year-old Missie Vassiltchikov recorded the fact soberly and succinctly:
‘This [new decree] is quite a blow, as one gets amazingly dirty in a big
town and it is one of the few ways to be warm.’21 Fortunately, there
were ways to circumvent the proscription. Bathhouses, for instance,
enjoyed a huge increase in business; one Finnish bathhouse in the capital
was fully booked for the whole of January.22 The American Embassy
even went so far as to install two steel bath tubs for the use of its
personnel. Due to the high demand, those wishing to avail themselves
of the facilities had to book a day in advance, and were given a twenty-
minute slot in which to have their bath.23
For ordinary Berliners the cold weather could prove to be more than
a mere inconvenience – it could be lethal. Berlin’s roads were more
treacherous than ever and accidents multiplied, even given the dramatic
fall in traffic volume. In January 1940 the number of accidents on the
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berlin at war
capital’s streets rose considerably, and according to police files the rise
was to be regarded exclusively as a by-product of the unusually cold
winter. Berlin’s mortuaries, meanwhile, processed nearly five hundred
bodies that month, an increase over the previous month of over 20
per cent.24
It was little safer to stay at home. For those huddling around gas
fires and ovens, for example, the risk of gas poisoning was ever present.
In February, an elderly couple were found dead in Charlottenburg.25
It appeared that they had been sleeping in the kitchen with the stove
lit to provide warmth. When the flame went out, the gas overwhelmed
them in their sleep.
There were other perils. Many house fires that winter were caused
by ovens and gas fires left burning by residents desperate to keep warm.
There were also cases of residents attempting to thaw frozen pipes in
their apartments by lighting charcoal fires, which subsequently burned
out of control.26 The cold spell wrought havoc with Berlin’s ageing
network of water pipes. In the suburb of Stahnsdorf, a burst water
main caused the entire road surface to collapse, leaving a hole fully six
metres across.27 Pipes bursting inside apartment blocks were less spec-
tacular, but no less destructive. In one instance, a burst pipe in a third-
floor flat in Steglitz not only damaged the two floors below, but also
flooded the cellar.28
Yet, aside from the immediate and practical concerns of the people,
the cold and the lack of coal posed a profound challenge to the author-
ities. For one thing, the coal shortage meant that locomotives were
often left stranded, with the result that marshalling yards descended
into chaos and the city’s transport network rapidly ground to a halt.
In one instance, a short commuter train ride across Berlin, which
would normally have taken a mere twenty minutes, took in excess of
nine hours.29 In retrospect, one might conclude that the commuters
were lucky to have arrived at all. One SD report claimed that workers
attempting to travel into the capital from the outlying areas were
spending as much as fifteen hours travelling per day.30
The next problem was that when supplies were finally restored they
were often unevenly distributed. Growing public discontent at such condi-
tions was not easily stilled. When the first trickles of coal supply finally
made it to the capital, for instance, it was found that those merchants
who were prepared to pay cash were often given priority. The resulting
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79
inequality of supply – where one Berliner received coal from his whole-
saler, but his neighbour did not – stoked class and political antagonisms
and spawned a number of pernicious conspiracy theories.
In addition, the difficulties of supply coupled with an increasingly
desperate public demand inevitably put tremendous upward pressure
on coal prices. Though consumer prices were fixed, many in the coal
industry began – with some success – to demand a revision of pricing
to reflect the increased transport costs that they were being forced to
bear.31 When the government also ordered additional restrictions on
the consumption of gas, the result was widespread public dismay that
the authorities could have had so little understanding of the hardship
already being endured in the capital.32
Such conditions were not conducive to the maintenance of public
confidence and order either. At first, complaints proliferated about
what was perceived as the improper use of transport infrastructure
during the coal crisis. Berliners were ‘astonished’ to see official trucks
used for clearing snow in suburban side streets, at a time when the