Berlin at War (22 page)

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

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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

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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