Exorcising Hitler (36 page)

At the Dortmund railway station we stopped to take pictures of the completely shattered and gutted station building. I wish we hadn’t. To get the sun at our backs and get a good view of the building, we stood on the streetcar loading platform in the middle of the street in front of it. There must have been about 100 Germans on it waiting for the next three-car trolley to come. We were all relatively well-dressed, in pseudo-uniform . . . and had fancy cameras hanging from our necks. Our Volkswagen (FRS team’s) was the only auto in sight most of the time. Many of the Germans glowered at us sullenly. I could feel their glances like knives in our backs. I felt, probably mistakenly, that the tiniest provocation would result in our massacre at their bare hands . . .

. . . There are very few English soldiers here – perhaps 20 in a town of 200,000. That may have something to do with it. There are 3,000 French, so Dr. Schaffer of the Santé Publique says, in Koblenz, a town of 53,000 . . .
²⁵

It was broadly true that the left led the fight against hunger in the Western zones. However, perhaps the most grotesque difference between the lives of those Germans who served the Allied presence and the mass of the conquered people occurred not, as might have been expected, in any of the ‘capitalistic’ Western-controlled parts of the country, but in the Soviet Zone and the Soviet sectors of Berlin. Right from the start, the ready-made German communist elite in the East was openly privileged by their Soviet masters, and in a blatantly elitist fashion.

An eyewitness reported the shock of outsiders who, on being admitted to Communist Party HQ in Berlin during 1945, when the general population was near to starving, found an entirely separate and hierarchical ration system at work. Meals supplied to Party members by the canteen kitchen were graduated entirely according to rank. Thus those of Party Secretary rank, the most senior, received a meal of several courses with wine, while section heads were entitled to a somewhat more modest but still enviably substantial meal. Rank-and-file Party workers got
Eintopf
(a mushy one-pot stew containing potato, pulses and greens, cooked in stock – with meat or sausage if you were lucky).
²⁶
It would have been hard for the average German, learning of such, for them, unimaginable luxury (even the
Eintopf
) not to have felt that the German communists, whatever their pretensions to solidarity, were essentially members of the occupying force.

It was hardly surprising that, despite all the threats and the propaganda, many previously respectable Germans quickly lost all but the most vestigial sense of guilt when it came to trading in or benefiting from the black market. Either they would buy from or barter with dealers who assumed the risk of importing food into the towns, or they would travel out into the countryside and do direct deals with the now all-powerful farmers – naturally, at exorbitant prices. The black market did, of course, favour the relatively wealthy – those who had valuables to sell or barter, or large enough amounts of cash that even in the devalued state of the currency they could buy urgent necessities. Most industrial workers, for instance, had no such advantages.

There was very limited deterrent effect in the fact that joint patrols of the Allied military and the German police visited farms to ensure that no produce was being hoarded for the black market, or that checkpoints were set up on bridges and at railway stations and travellers searched to ensure that they had acquired no black market goods on their travels. In the British Zone, from the spring of 1946, random searches were carried out on the highways by mobile police squads.
²⁷

In the French Zone, railway stations and approach roads to cities such as Koblenz were also ruthlessly patrolled by the French-controlled police. ‘At the station, any food they found on people, they would confiscate . . . the French were horrible [
ekelig
] in that regard,’ recalls Marlies Weber (née Theby). As a girl she frequently went on ‘hamstering’ trips into the countryside around Koblenz with her family as a way of bolstering an unreliable ration that was in any case lower in the French Zone than in any other. They would return with their illegal provisions on foot, often using minor roads to re-enter the city in the hope of avoiding French patrols.
²⁸

In the British Zone, the story was similar, although it seems that the British and the German police conducted raids on a sporadic but occasionally intense scale. Towards the end of March 1946, for instance, a ‘synchronized counter Black Market operation’ codenamed ‘Second Round’ was carried out in Westphalia province, which extended from the agricultural areas to the north and east to the outskirts of the Ruhr industrial area (Münster–Bielefeld–Dortmund–Hagen).

The three-day operation seems to have mainly involved setting up random checkpoints and searching cars and their passengers (approximately 46,000 altogether). One hundred and eighty-eight mobile teams of German police, ‘assisted’ by British military personnel, arrested 128 civilians, with another 472 charged and 485 summoned to court at a future date for what were presumably relatively minor offences. ‘The articles confiscated,’ according to a report for the Black Market Standing Committee at Military Government (Mil.Gov) HQ in Münster, ‘were mainly items of food, but tobacco and cigarettes were also very much in evidence.’
²⁹

An appendix to the report painstakingly – in fact excruciatingly – lists every single item confiscated during the course of this obviously time-consuming and expensive operation. Alongside the inevitable ‘15,325.8 kg potatoes’, ‘52.650 kg leguminous plants’ and ‘747 cigarettes’ are strange and surprising items – ‘10023 combs’, ‘1 tea set’, ‘1 tin of zinc-ointment’, ‘1 play-suit with cap’, and so on and on until it seems no simple item carried on the human person was exempt.
³⁰
This Sisyphean task was not helped by the slowness of the German courts, which was put down to staff shortages. At the end of March, before ‘Second Round’, the progress of current cases against alleged black market dealers stood as follows:

There is absolutely no indication that the situation improved as the months wore on. One problem was the doubt in official German legal circles that the sale of cigarettes ‘at an excessive price’ was, in fact, an offence. The British, overwhelmed here as so often elsewhere in their post-war occupation, were forced to fall back on a set of emergency wartime economic regulations (
Kriegswirtschaftsverordnung
) dating from the Nazi regime (November 1940). When, following the local German State Prosecutor’s objections to the use of these regulations against cigarette traders, an opinion was sought from the Control Commission’s lawyers at its London headquarters, the eventual advice was predictably ambivalent. To objections that the Nazi-originated regulations applied only in wartime (‘objection c’), the report announced in a masterstroke of equivocation:

It is, of course, true that the object of the Kriegswirtschaftsverordnung was to meet wartime difficulties. However, the ordinance has not yet been repealed and the scarcity of goods which was the reason for the provisions of sections 22 to 28 on ‘war prices’ still subsists and appears to have been accentuated since 1939. This applies particularly to food and cigarettes. There does not, therefore, seem to be a sufficient reason for assuming that the charge of selling English cigarettes at an excessive price would be dismissed in the German courts on account of objection c. On the other hand, there is no absolute certainty that such a charge would lead to a conviction in the courts.
³²

The only certain way to limit the black market to any extent would have been the reliable provision of adequate rations, and that was never wholly the case in any of the zones. If the Germans did not have enough to eat or keep warm, and were either unable or forbidden by myriad occupation regulations to create the means of paying for these necessities, and German money was more or less without value in any case, then the development of a parallel economy (or, more brutally expressed, black market) was inevitable.

‘The cigarette,’ said another British report, this time a survey of large-scale black market operations prepared by the CCG’s Economic Information Section in Berlin, ‘is the begin all and end all of the black market. It has replaced the Reich mark as normal currency. Together with chocolate and alcohol derived from allied stores and canteens, the cigarette is probably one of the biggest single threats to financial stability in the country.’
³³

The writer of the report concluded:

Illegal trading in Germany and from Germany beyond its frontiers in addition to ordinary black market activities have reached unprecedented proportions which threaten to ruin what little remains of her financial and economic structure. Whilst Berlin has developed into the international centre of these illegal transactions, other cities and towns in the Western zones are also of great consequence. In the British Zone, Hamburg is outstanding, whilst in the American Zone Frankfurt and Munich hold the leading places.

All nationalities appear to be involved, including a fair number of Allied personnel now working in Germany in an official capacity.

Practically each individual investigation unearths some new aspect of this black picture and brings forth a further list of personalities who are involved in it . . .
³⁴

The report is thoroughly bleak in tone. However, as such reports will, it recommended energetic further action. There is no indication that any action which took place then, or later, seriously dented the power of the parallel economy.

And, of course, many Allied personnel were intimately and quite matter-of-factly involved in the black market at all levels. The same soldiers who might one day be manning roadblocks to catch German black market operators would then go back to the NAAFI or the mess of an evening and consume liquor and food obtained at some mutual private profit from those same dubious sources.

According to Lieutenant Maurice Smelt of the Black Watch, stationed in Duisburg, the situation was pretty much universal:

Our mess ran on the black market until the day the SIB turned up at the Gordons [the Gordon Highlanders, also stationed in Duisburg] and told the Gordons exactly how they had been catering for the past months and they had better change their ways or there would be trouble. As soon as we heard about that we of course cleaned up our act so that when they came to us it was all all right. But the moment they had gone, we went back to the old way of operating.

Given that you would pay servants in cigarettes, how can you take a high moral line?

The suffering of the helpless mass provided, of course, an opportunity for a privileged or ruthless few. The fact that, by Smelt’s admission, men from his own regiment – many drawn from the least salubrious sections of Glasgow’s population – for some time also controlled illegal operations in the Duisburg docks, after a manner not unknown to Al Capone and his disciples, functions as a kind of poisonous icing on that particular cake. Several were finally arrested and, according to Smelt, who acted as a courts martial officer, at least one soldier was executed for what was effectively a gangland murder committed while under His Majesty’s command.
³⁵

If home-grown food supplies in Germany were inadequate, food had to be imported, but who was to pay for this? Not the Germans, because they were unable to produce the coal and manufactured goods that would have supplied the necessary foreign exchange. Why was this? In large part, because Germans simply were not physically strong enough to hew the coal and roll the steel that would build up the country’s export trade and pay for food. They were not physically strong enough because rations were inadequate. And German currency was worth only a little more than nothing. Therefore food had to be imported and paid for by the occupying powers . . . and so the story continued.

After Morgenthau, and JCS 1067, and all the talk of making the Germans suffer, just a few months into the occupation the British and the Americans found themselves trapped in the vicious circle that was punitive post-war policy.

The London
Times
expressed the problem clearly in the second autumn after the end of the war: