Berlin at War (21 page)

made for the military were often useless. In some cases, the dyes ran

in wet weather, staining the wearer bright green. In others the

material began to smell or simply dissolved.78

One of the most common – and unpopular – ersatz products was

coffee. Made from roasted malt or chicory and known colloquially as

Muckefuck
– from the French
mocca faux
– it was a poor, caffeine-free alternative. Christabel Bielenberg summed up the criticisms by

contrasting the advertising slogans with the reality. Where the adver-

tisements promised a product that was ‘healthy, strength giving, tasty’

and ‘indistinguishable from the real thing’, she noted sourly that

Muckefuck
was indistinguishable except in one vital respect: ‘that one

produced coffee and the other a nauseating brown mess’.79

Complaining about such products was not only futile, it could also

be perilous. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted the fate of a woman who

complained about the quality of skimmed milk, which she described

as ‘slop’. Denounced to the authorities for the remark, the woman had

to report to the police station every day for three months, where she

had to repeat aloud before the assembled officials and police officers:

‘There is no skim milk. There is only decreamed fresh milk.’80

There were a couple of state-sponsored alternatives to the endless

queuing and ersatz. The first was the Army Day commemoration, each

March, during which Berliners could buy soldiers’ rations without having

to part with ration coupons. Rather less popular was the ubiquitous

Eintopf
, or ‘one pot meal’, a simple catch-all stew that was ordered to

be served by every household once a month. The idea was that the

Eintopf
would be consumed by Gauleiters and ordinary workmen alike,

enhancing a sense of national solidarity, while the resources thus saved

would benefit the wider economy. Though primarily intended to be

prepared within each household, the
Eintopf
was also served in

restaurants, hotels and even al fresco by the Nazi welfare organisations.

On Berlin’s streets, vast wheeled soup kitchens – colloquially known as

‘goulash cannons’ – would appear, from which the steaming stew would

be ladled out to the waiting public.

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91

Theory aside, the
Eintopf
did not prove popular with many. William

Shirer – used to dining in style at the best hotels – complained in his

diary about the ‘cheap stew’ that he was occasionally obliged to eat.

Missie Vassiltchikov was also unimpressed. On one occasion, she had

arranged to eat out with friends, but then realised what was on the menu:

‘We had hoped to have a good meal, but it turned out to be
Eintopf
day.’

The ‘tasteless stew’ left her ‘much disgusted’.81

Those who could afford it could go out to a restaurant to eat, at

least until Goebbels’ austerity drive, in the aftermath of the Battle of

Stalingrad early in 1943, forced the majority of them to close. Before

then, Berlin’s restaurants, bars and cafés continued to trade, with ration

Marken
merely exchanged – along with payment – for the appropriate

quantities and categories of food. To this end, waiters were generally

armed with scissors to be able to clip the necessary coupons from the

customer’s card, when a meal was ordered.

Eating out had its advantages. Foremost was that one could avail

oneself of those items that – subject to availability – were not restricted

by the rationing, such as fish, fowl and pasta. Strangely, many delica-

cies – including lobster and champagne – were not rationed and were

available to those that could afford them right up to 1943. Missie

Vassiltchikov, who seems to have spent much of her time in Berlin

frequenting the best restaurants, recalled dining on ‘lobster and other

plutocratic delicacies . . . at Savarin’s’.82 The anti-Nazi plotter Hans Oster,

meanwhile, famously wagered a lunch of oysters and champagne at the

Berlin Cavalry-Guards Club with his colleagues, claiming that Hitler’s

armies would be defeated in France in 1940. When proven wrong, he

kept to the bargain.83

There were two main problems with eating out, however. The first

was the cost. A meal, with wine, in a decent restaurant cost almost

as much as the average Berliner made in a week. The second problem

was the indifferent quality offered by the majority of Berlin hostel-

ries. As the war progressed, the quality of restaurant food suffered,

and, as many diarists attest, the dishes actually available rarely coin-

cided with those on the menus. A menu from 1943 for the prestigious

Berlin restaurant Borchardt shows what inroads the shortages had

made into the fare available to the ordinary paying customer. The

restaurant offered one basic dish: red cabbage, mashed potato and an

unspecified cut of meat. In addition, there were two soups available

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berlin at war

– a ‘special’ soup and a vegetable consommé – as well as ‘field kitchen’

dishes, such as ‘Pork with Bavarian cabbage’.84

Yet if the prestige establishments found their menus restricted, the

majority of less salubrious restaurants were often unable to supply

even the most basic fare. Howard Smith recalled a visit to the ‘Pschorr

Haus’, a large brewery-restaurant on Potsdamer Platz, which he

described as ‘
the
typical, average, big Berlin restaurant’. After noting how run-down the building was, with dingy interiors, dirty tables and

the lingering smell of ‘bad fish’, Smith described what was on offer:

There are only two meat dishes on the menu, one of which is struck

through with a pencil mark . . . The other is generally two little sausages

of uncertain contents, each about the size of a cigar butt. Before the meat

they give you a chalky, red, warm liquid called tomato soup . . . With the

meat you get four or five yellow potatoes with black blotches on them.85

In addition to such obvious shortcomings, it seems many restaur-

ants were also cutting corners in the kitchen and were cheating their

customers of their ration allowance. In an internal SS mood report

from March 1943, complaints were aired that, although restaurants

demanded fat coupons from customers, fat was evidently not used

in the cooking. The report quoted a chef who had worked in a

number of restaurants in Berlin and Potsdam, and who had confirmed

to investigators that the practice was widespread. He claimed that

one of his employers had demanded a coupon for 15 grams of fat,

for a dish of fried plaice, when in fact no fat was used in the cooking

and food colouring was applied instead.86 In this way, it seems,

unscrupulous restaurateurs could make their own supplies go much

further.

For those lacking the necessary funds, or unwilling to sacrifice

their ration allocation for such questionable fare, there were alter-

native sources of food available. The most obvious option was to try

to grow your own. To this end, those with access to a garden would

start a vegetable patch, to produce carrots, potatoes and other essen-

tials. By 1942, most of the city’s open spaces and parks had been

converted in this way. Benedikt Dietrich recalled that his family

received pumpkin seeds from relatives abroad, which were duly

planted in their small garden and in time made an important – if

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93

rather monotonous – contribution to the family diet.87 Those without

access to a ‘kitchen garden’ made do as best they could, often searching

for fruit, weeds and wild plants that might be used in cooking, such

as rosehips, apples, nettles, dandelions and, of course, fungi.

Some were more adventurous. The rearing of chickens – for meat

and eggs – was widespread, especially in suburban districts. Christabel

Bielenberg, who was then living in the elegant western suburb of

Dahlem, recalled the initial displeasure of her middle-class neighbours

when she and her husband started keeping hens. ‘Did she not know’,

she was asked, ‘that Dahlem was a very respectable residential area?’

In time, however, such complaints would be silenced:

As the thermometer began its descent to unheard of depths and the

food rations seemed bent on the same downhill path, the sepulchral

cluckings from our cellar, which echoed regularly across the hedgetops,

made havoc of our neighbours’ status qualms. We noticed discreet

wooden structures being erected in bushes and behind unused garages,

and felt assured that by spring our corner of the smart residential district

would greet the dawn as merrily as a busy barnyard.88

Rabbit keeping also became popular. Larger breeds such as the

Flemish Giant and the German Grey were favoured, as they yielded

the greater portion of meat. Angoras, too, were much prized for their

wool. An official breeding programme was even begun in a number

of concentration camps, to produce Angora wool for use in the lining

of Luftwaffe flying suits.89 The needs of the average civilian rabbit

keeper were much more mundane. But, as rabbits bred swiftly and

could be used both for their meat and their skin, they proved so popular

that the authorities decreed that only one animal was to be permitted

for each member of the household. As they could even be kept by

those living in apartments with no access to a garden, they were often

referred to as ‘balcony pigs’.90

For those unwilling or unable to keep chickens or ‘balcony pigs’,

the alternative was to make an arrangement with someone who did.

To this end, many Berliners would travel – on so-called
Hamsterfahrten
,

or ‘hamstering trips’ – out into the countryside surrounding the city to

deal directly with the local farmers and smallholders. There they would

make cash purchases or – increasingly – barter anything they could

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berlin at war

take with them for ham, eggs, bacon or vegetables. One Berlin mother

traded a ring, bracelet and necklace set with garnets in return for a

kilo of bread and a small jar of marmalade.91 This activity, though

widespread, was illegal and those caught would have to reckon with

the confiscation of their ‘haul’ as well as a fine, or worse.

There were more legitimate ways of achieving the same result.

Some would request food packages from relations in rural areas,

where the shortages were not so severe and access to meat and fresh

produce was easier. Others would look to exploit the evacuation of a

child to the countryside to secure additional food. For many Berliners,

such supplies – whether legitimately obtained or otherwise – made

the vital difference and helped to stave off the pangs of hunger.

Though such activities were more or less constant features of Berlin

life, there were a few food sources that were rather more sporadic or

unusual. The Allied bombing briefly provided a boon for Berliners,

when the city’s zoo was hit in the autumn of 1943. In the aftermath,

there was a short-lived glut of meat – most of which, thankfully, was

unidentifiable. Lutz Heck recalled:

We had meat coming out of our ears. Many of the edible animals

which had fallen victim to the air raid ended up in the pot. Particularly

tasty were the crocodiles’ tails; cooked tender in big containers, they

tasted like fat chicken. The dead deer, buffalo and antelopes provided

hundreds of meals for man and beast alike. Later on, bear ham and

bear sausage were a particular delicacy.92

Also, to most people’s astonishment, the meat ration in Germany

was periodically doubled in 1943 and 1944.93 Consumers, naturally, were

delighted. Fifteen-year-old Dieter Borkowski initially took the news as

evidence that the war was progressing well for Germany, and made the

mistake of expressing his enthusiasm for the measure while collecting

his family rations from the butcher. He was soon put straight. ‘You fool!’

said the butcher:

You will see what becomes of it. Those are the calves and cows from

the Ukraine, and we won’t have them next year! Emergency slaugh-

tering due to planned withdrawals by the Greater German Wehrmacht!

That’s what they call it. You’ll see, my boy, next year we will be slicing

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95

everything thinner and tightening our belts. After all those retreats,

we’ll be happy to have some dried bread!94

The butcher was right. But in the meantime, the ‘emergency slaugh-

tering’ lasted for some months and provided a much-needed fillip to

hard-pressed Berlin housewives. Even in the summer of 1944, as the

German Eastern Front began to collapse, large numbers of cattle

were still being herded west and slaughtered to keep them from falling

into the hands of the Soviet army.

Dwarfing even those not inconsiderable supplies were the vast

amounts of goods sent home to the Reich by German soldiers serving

in the occupied lands of Europe. Much of this was the result of simple

plunder, especially that which originated on the more lawless Eastern