Authors: Roger Moorhouse
Front. However, the vast majority of it was legitimately purchased
and sent home from comparatively well-supplied areas such as France,
Belgium and Denmark. German soldiers stripped occupied western
Europe bare, like a plague of field-grey locusts. Either sending it by
post or carrying it themselves, they transported enormous amounts
of foodstuffs and consumer items to the Reich: bacon and butter from
Denmark, fish and fox furs from Norway, eggs from Ukraine, tobacco
from Greece or honey from Russia. Often soldiers would receive a
‘wish list’ of foods and consumables from family members and friends,
which they subsequently endeavoured to fulfil.
This state of affairs was tolerated, even encouraged, by the mili-
tary authorities. All of the controls by which such transactions were
traditionally kept within reasonable bounds – from currency exchange
rates and purchase restrictions to transport limits and soldiers’ finan-
cial allowances – were abolished or set to the advantage of German
soldiers, with the clear aim of facilitating purchasing. Göring even
formulated what became known as the
Schlepperlass
, or ‘Schlepp
Decree’, in October 1940, which stated that German soldiers abroad
could take with them on home leave whatever they could carry so
long as it was intended for their personal use.95 They were effectively
given carte blanche to strip bare the shelves of occupied Europe.
More than anywhere else, occupied France was viewed as the mother
lode. One contemporary observer noted that the fall of France in June
1940 ‘yielded a wide-open treasure chest to the German civil popu-
lation’ as the ‘contents of the rich boulevard shops of Paris and the
96
berlin at war
well-stocked pantries and the wine-cellars of the French countryside’
were systematically emptied by Wehrmacht troops.96 Göring was even
said to have urged German troops in France to ‘transform yourselves
into a pack of hunting dogs and always be on the lookout for what
will be useful to the people of Germany’.97 Such avarice was clearly
not confined to necessities, however. One historian has reported that
German soldiers leaving France on home leave were ‘loaded down with
heavy packages . . . Their luggage crammed with lingerie, specialities
from Paris and luxury goods of every description.’98
Consequently Berlin saw a temporary but nonetheless obvious jump
in material wealth. As Howard Smith noted in 1942:
the first effects of the war were not the traditional ones of decay and
scarcity, but a sudden leap upwards in visible prosperity. Berlin charwomen
and housemaids, whose legs had never been caressed by silk, began wearing
silk stockings from the Boulevard Haussmann as an everyday thing – ‘from
my Hans at the front’. Little street corner taverns began displaying rows
of Armagnac, Martell and Courvoisier Cognac from the cellars of Maxim’s
and others. Every little bureaucrat in the capital could produce at dinner
a fine, fat bottle of the best French champagne.99
Though there was a certain amount of hyperbole in such obser-
vations, the principle behind it was certainly accurate. Berlin, it seems,
survived – even flourished – for a season, on the enforced largesse of
occupied Paris.
Not all the goods thus acquired abroad and brought into the Reich
were consumed or used by their primary recipient. Silk stockings and
eau de Cologne were of little immediate use to those enduring the
pangs of hunger, but they could be exchanged or bartered for food.
In this way, many a farmer’s wife became well supplied with luxuries.
Some, evidently, were rather too well supplied. One farmer near
Potsdam refused the offer of four pairs of stockings in return for some
fruit. ‘What am I supposed to do with those?’ he exclaimed, ‘my wife
already has thirty-eight pairs of them lying around.’100 Indeed, Ruth
Andreas-Friedrich complained in 1943 about the greed of rural farmers
who ‘trade bacon for dress goods, eggs for jewellery, butter for stock-
ings’. ‘Their abundance’, she wrote rather haughtily, ‘doesn’t suit our
distress; their smug materialism is . . . alien to us.’101
marching on their stomachs
97
Though such supplies made a tremendous difference to the soldiers’
families who received them, much of the material also found its way
onto the black market. Any political system that seeks to control the
supply and pricing of goods will develop a black market, and wartime
Germany was no exception. In Berlin, the area of Alexanderplatz was
the very heart of the illegal trading network – ironically right under
the nose of the
Kriminalpolizei
, whose headquarters was nearby.
One example of black-marketeering in the German capital is that
of fifty-five-year-old Martha Rebbien. Arrested in November 1944,
Rebbien admitted under interrogation that she had lived from the black
market for the previous four years, exchanging foodstuffs, luxuries and
household essentials. It emerged that she had a circle of around sixty
people with whom she did business, each of whom had a similar circle
of their own.102 Networks such as these spread right across the city,
from the humble tenement blocks of Friedrichshain to the elegant villas
of Dahlem. It has been estimated that the black market in Nazi Germany
accounted for at least 10 per cent of average household consumption.103
Nationally, this may well be the case. But for larger urban centres such
as Berlin – where the competition for ‘home-grown’ produce was that
much greater – the black market would have been considerably larger.
Everybody would have had their ‘source’. Everybody would have known
a street corner, or a bar, where one could purchase something illegally,
or – as the Berliners put it –
schwarz
, ‘black’.
The growing black market criminalised large sections of normally
law-abiding citizens. One observer of this development was the
Norwegian journalist Theo Findahl, who was based in Berlin until
1945, as a correspondent of the Oslo
Aftenposten
. In the latter stages
of the war, he noted that the atmosphere in the city was something
similar to that of a detective novel, with suspicion ever-present, directed
especially towards foreigners like himself. ‘We are all criminals’, he
wrote,
all of us, and the more sensitive amongst us never enjoy a clear
conscience. It’s not enough that we are all, more or less closet ‘enemies
of the state’, who are of the opinion that Hitler is insane and is leading
his people into oblivion, rather we all do something, almost everyday,
which is illegal; small transactions with Swedish, Swiss, Danish or
Norwegian currency, purchases of petrol or similar from the black
98
berlin at war
market, bribes to government officials. Small things, of course, but in
Hitler’s Reich black marketeering is punishable by death!104
Though he was talking specifically about the few foreign corres-
pondents who were permitted to remain in wartime Berlin, his
comments could well have applied to almost any Berliner.
In the vast majority of cases the black market was a small-scale
affair, consisting of individuals taking advantage of the shortages and
restrictions to sell or exchange a few items. But in some cases the
black market in Berlin spilt over into the more serious realm of outright
corruption. Many senior Nazis, it seems, were not averse to profiting
from the war. It has been claimed, for instance, that three German
ministers – Wilhelm Frick, Bernhard Rust and Walther Darré – as well
as two commanders-in-chief – Walther von Brauchitsch for the army,
and Erich Raeder for the navy – were involved in the foodstuffs black
market in Berlin.105
The Nazi hierarchy easily found ways to avoid its own rationing
restrictions. One of the most famous examples was that of Horcher’s
restaurant, which was one of the renowned haunts of Hermann Göring
and Joseph Goebbels, and where – according to one diner – they scorned
the ‘very idea of rationing coupons’. Horcher’s was well protected by
the regime. Its staff were exempted from conscription, and when closure
was threatened in 1943 – as part of a post-Stalingrad austerity drive –
Göring responded by reopening the restaurant as a private club for the
Luftwaffe.106 Of course, for establishments such as Horcher’s, and for
the Nazi elite, there was always enough food to go round. And though
Hitler’s own tastes were decidedly Spartan, his fellow Nazis did not
share his frugality and moderation. Indeed, greed among the senior
personnel of the regime was to lead to one of the most notorious
corruption cases of the war.
August Nöthling ran a delicatessen from his premises on Schlossstrasse
in the southern Berlin suburb of Steglitz, and soon gained a reputation
for supplying to the Nazi elite of the capital, without the bothersome
question of ration cards being raised. Nöthling, for instance, had 25
pounds of chocolates, 120 kilos of poultry and 50 kilos of game deliv-
ered to the home of the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick.107 When the
authorities ordered a clampdown on consumption in the aftermath of
Stalingrad, therefore, Nöthling would have had good reason to believe
marching on their stomachs
99
that his contacts in the Nazi elite would be able to protect him from
prosecution.
That was not to be the case, however. Complaints about Nöthling,
it seems, had grown too numerous to ignore. As the official investiga-
tion discovered, the Berlin grapevine was alive with stories of Nöthling
– who was known as
Tütenaugust
, or ‘shopping bags August’ – and
damning opinions of what the case said about wartime German society.
The investigation concluded that the case had caused ‘considerable
damage’ to public morale, and to the belief in justice and order in the
Third Reich.108
So
Tütenaugust
was ‘hung out to dry’ by his esteemed customers.
Although Foreign Minister Ribbentrop refused to cooperate with the
police enquiry, others were much less punctilious, pleading ignorance,
or blaming Nöthling for persuading their wives, or their cooks, to
place large, unnecessary grocery orders. The chief of Berlin police,
Wolf von Helldorf, was the driving force of the prosecution, in spite
of the fact that he had been one of Nöthling’s most enthusiastic
customers. Fined and imprisoned for five months, Nöthling hanged
himself in his cell in the summer of 1943.109
For the remainder of the war, the food supply situation in the
German capital continued in much the same way. The ration alloca-
tion – though in many cases largely theoretical – continued to supply
the very basics for sustenance, such as poor-quality bread and meat
of sometimes dubious origin. The system staggered, certainly, but it
did not collapse. However, the average Berliner would have struggled
to survive solely on what the ration cards allowed. Diets had to be
complemented by items purchased by relations abroad, ‘hamstered’
from the countryside, or traded illegally on the black market. By the
end of the war, indeed, most Berliners relied to some extent on illegal
means to feed their families and themselves.
Yet, for all the hardship, no one had yet starved to death in wartime
Berlin. In the last winter of the war, a Wehrmacht mood report from
the capital noted that ‘the overwhelming majority [of the population]
were of the opinion . . . that the food situation [had been] much worse
during the old World War’.110 Such praise, however faint, must have
been music to the regime’s ears.
5
Brutality Made Stone
In the late autumn of 1941, a peculiar construction began to take shape
high on a railway embankment in the southern district of Tempelhof.
The structure was about the same size as a three-storey detached house,
except that it had no windows or doors and consisted instead of layer
upon layer of concrete, poured by French prisoners of war. Once finished,
it resembled a vast champagne cork, with a circular ‘head’ standing
14 metres (45 feet) high with a diameter of 21 metres (68 feet), and a
narrower concrete base below it descending over 18 metres (59 feet)
into the ground. Except for three vertical maintenance shafts built into
the base, the structure was completely solid and weighed over 12,600
tons – about the same as a Royal Navy cruiser. Officially, it was known
as the
Schwerbelastungskörper
, or ‘heavy load-bearing body’, but the local population christened it ‘the mushroom’.1
It is highly doubtful whether those locals, or indeed the French POWs
who built the ‘mushroom’, were ever told what it was for. In fact, it was
an enormous measuring device. Its base had a surface area of precisely
100 square metres, thereby facilitating the necessary calculations, while
the shafts built into its base were fitted with precisely calibrated equip-
ment to measure how much the structure sank into the ground. It was