Exorcising Hitler (34 page)

Given that none of the occupying powers could or would provide guaranteed supplies at a level sufficient for the German population to sustain a satisfactory level of life, it is unsurprising that the black market (and various forms of ‘grey market’) flourished right from the start.

The Allied soldiers, and later the occupation administrations’ imported civilian officials, had food, or at least access to it, and other currencies such as cigarettes, while the German population could offer things in exchange that the occupiers wanted – from radios and cameras, antiques and works of art, to simple pleasures of the flesh.

8

To the Victors the Spoils

Once the initial orgy of looting was over, trading began.

Lieutenant Wladimir Gelfand was among the many who would occasionally stray into the economic shadows, especially the big black markets in Berlin, which existed illegally but surprisingly openly in the Tiergarten in the western part of Berlin near the Reichstag, in the Potsdamer Platz, which straddled the sector border, and around the Alexanderplatz in the east. Of one such visit he wrote in his diary:

I hitch-hiked to Berlin. I got out at the market near the Reichstag [i.e. the Tiergarten] and stayed on the fringes, so as to more easily avoid any patrols. I purchased a few trifles (a fountain pen, batteries) and soon I had spent all my money. Then I decided to sell the watch I had bought from the Rilewskis to a fellow officer, with whom I had travelled from the regimental headquarters, since he was due to go home. I sold him it for the same price I had bought it, and with that I had one and a half thousand Marks in my pocket . . .
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On another occasion, this time at the Alexanderplatz, it seemed as if there was no actual black market. Gelfand saw that the entire square was being strictly patrolled by Red Army MPs, who were checking all papers, even of officers senior in rank to them. Frustrated in his aim of purchasing a few desirable items, Gelfand hit upon an idea. There were some shoeshine stands on the square. The lieutenant sauntered over, and one of the expert polishers got to work as Gelfand stood on the spot.

I was immediately surrounded by people, who started offering me goods that they had hidden underneath their coats. I stood there as if I had noticed nothing and just watched while my boots began to gleam like mirrors under the attention of the shoeshine boys.

The crowd was dispersed several times, and several times soldiers with ‘MP’ armbands came and looked me over – even their commander, an officer. But they simply couldn’t find anything wrong.

Meanwhile, I had already succeeded in purchasing a shirt, a leather jacket, three pairs of men’s socks and some gloves. And once my boots were through with being polished, the shoeshine boy was told to make himself scarce.
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As for the constant hunger that bedevilled the lives of Germans at this time, Gelfand, for all his fastidiousness, seems to have given it scarcely a thought. He had little understanding of the pressures Germans were under, and virtually zero empathy. In fact, he found the neediness of the natives repulsive. Visiting a German girlfriend, Marianne, in the town of Velten, just outside Berlin, he obtained and brought the obligatory food, but was contemptuous of the recipients’ reaction to his gift:

Her mother was pleased at the food, as I had anticipated the previous day, but her attitude and her greed robbed me of the last of my patience and poisoned my feelings to such an extent that it halfway extinguished my inclination towards her daughter.

I gave her a small jar of lard and suggested making fried potatoes and then eating them together for supper. She grabbed the jar with both hands, emptied the contents on to a plate and then cleaned out the jar with a spoon and her fingers. There was some kind of liquid already in the pan, so I went over to it, took a knife and cut a slice of the lard I had brought with me. I intended to put it into the pan, but then the old lady winced, let out a cry, threw herself at me, screamed like a thing possessed, and made as if to take it away from me.

‘What is wrong?’ I asked, perplexed. ‘Why?’

She explained it was for her, for tomorrow and other days, and today I must eat her broth.

That didn’t suit me. I knew that decent people don’t do something like this, and my outrage was limitless, but I pulled myself together, smiled as if nothing was amiss, and nevertheless tossed a piece of lard into the pan. The German woman closed her eyes and moaned.
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It is possible that Marianne’s mother was, as Gelfand describes her a little later, ‘a worthless old woman’, but much more likely that she was simply desperate. The lard her guest wasted so carelessly represented rare and precious nourishment for the mother and her family. There was undoubtedly an almost grotesque insensitivity at work here in Gelfand’s criticism of her lack of ‘hospitality’, and also, perhaps, a hint of sadistic retribution on the part of a man who, whatever his virtues compared with his more brutish comrades, was both Russian and Jewish and well aware of how people like him had been treated during the German occupation of his country.

Humiliating as it was, such encounters were, for the Germans, among the few opportunities to raise their standard of living to something near bearable. Either the women found boyfriends among the occupiers, or they simply sold themselves. If they were really lucky, they and any adult males who had either avoided the war or been released from POW camps somehow got jobs as cooks, waiters or cleaners in Allied canteens and billets, or succeeded in gaining employment as secretaries or translators.

Some of the officials of the British occupation administration spoke the language and knew and cared about the country, as George Clare, a German-speaking Austrian Jew serving with the British Army, recalled, but there were also many ‘middle-aged middle-class ex-officers, who saw the CCG (Control Commission Germany) as their last refuge from a Britain so changed they felt strangers in their own country’. He continued:

At that time the Control Commission employed 26,000 British Personnel, of which only a minority, approximately 6,000, actually dealt with Germany. The others made up its swollen bureaucracy, a happy hunting ground for those former majors and half-colonels, some of them of that grand colonial manner so worrying to Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the German Social Democrats. He was only half-joking when he said that the one reason he feared India’s coming independence was that her unemployed Pukka-Sahibs might be dispatched to Germany to civilise the natives.
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A British officer stationed in the Ruhr explained his own experience:

We did have a weird currency which had no value – occupation currency. It meant nothing to the Germans, but their currency, the Reich mark, meant nothing to anybody. The real thing that made the wheels go round was cigarettes and coffee. The use of this black market was universal at a trivial level. I got my laundry done for ten cigarettes a week – off it went and came back beautifully done for ten cigarettes. I didn’t go in much for coffee, but I was a smoker, and you could get cigs cheaply from the officers’ mess. To put it simply, you were virtually given free money . . .
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Would-be German employees of the occupation were assisted by the fact that soon the Anglo-Americans, in particular, were keen to replace their own personnel with (cheaper) German workers and, where possible, their officials with German officials.
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It was not the money that drew the Germans – the value of old Reich marks soon fell so low that hundreds or thousands were required to purchase everyday items, even if these were available – but the precious access to leftovers, slops, stores, cigarettes and so on. It seems that most of these jobs went to educated, often upper-class Germans, predominantly women, who before the end of the war would not have dreamed of working as, essentially, servants, but who, at least for now, saw it as a privilege.
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As for working-class girls, often bombed out of their homes and unemployed, they were known to more fortunate (and snobbish) compatriots as
Ruinenmäuschen
(literally,
little mice of the ruins), and they were desperate to sell rather different skills to the conquerors.

A young American stationed in Berlin with his unit published an article in
The New Republic
. He asked his readers to imagine ‘your own 18–19-year-old son removed entirely from your supervision, given an almost unlimited supply of money, granted a power over women equal to that of Van Johnson or Clark Gable, fed a steady diet of lies and stories calculated to inspire suspicion, hate and cynicism, and placed among a people who had lost all moral standards’:

The women of Berlin are hungry, cold, and lonesome. The GIs have cigarettes, which will buy food and coal. The GIs have food – chocolate, doughnuts (taken in large quantities from the Red Cross Clubs) . . . The GIs have warm nightclubs. And the GIs provide a kind of security and meaning in an otherwise meaningless city. The result is an aggressive and wholesale manhunt in the city. They stand in front of the GI nightclubs, parade up and down the streets in front of the Red Cross Clubs . . . ‘Ich liebe dich’ . . . has become no more meaningful than ‘How do you do?’ . . .
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It was not just in the Russian Zone that the rate of sexually transmitted disease skyrocketed. In one battalion of a Scottish regiment stationed in Germany, around eighteen months after the end of the war, out of 800 men, 108 were under surveillance for possible VD. Becoming infected was not an offence, but failing to report infection was. Miscreants were forced to go on a Sunday morning ‘rogues’ gallery’ march through the town, where German civilians could see who they were – and local women be forewarned about who was ‘clean’ and who not.
⁹

Since tobacco was a far more potent currency than the Reich mark, the job of
Kippensammler
(cigarette-butt collector) became a recognised trade. Waiters in restaurants and clubs frequented by Allied personnel could make a decent supplementary income from such activities. At the Café Wien, they were reckoned to make around $5 per hundred.
¹⁰

The first winter after the war was, fortunately, a mild one, and so the famine conditions feared by many Allied and German officials could be avoided. All the same, in Berlin alone it was reckoned that 12,000 human beings died of hunger or of diseases associated with malnutrition during the first post-war year.
¹¹
Part of the problem was that the Russians refused to allow importation of either fuel or food for the western sectors from their own zone, which surrounded the city, pleading lack of surplus. Coal and food therefore had to be imported into the American, British and French sectors from their respective Western zones.
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It may have been true that there were shortages in the Soviet Zone – where, in those months, were there not? – but since eastern Germany had been and remained the most productive agricultural region in the country, the Soviet refusal was yet another straw in the wind, presaging the difficulties that were soon to turn into conflicts, and from there to swell up into the great confrontation that became known as the Cold War.

Things were even worse in the British Zone. The problems there were varied and serious. Britain had been bankrupted by the war it had just won, with huge debts and a crippling shortage of foreign currency. The US had ended Lend-Lease with, so it seemed to the British, shocking abruptness. The advent of peace brought not a relaxation of rationing in the United Kingdom but a tightening of the dietary screws. At the beginning of 1946, the British Ministry of Food announced, on top of reductions in clothing rations, cuts in the allowances for bacon, poultry and eggs – and also told the public that, to save on foreign exchange, dried eggs would cease to be imported from America. Urged on by the largely opposition-friendly press, there ensued something like a housewives’ revolt, which eventually resulted in resumed imports of dried eggs.

Later in the year, the British government also introduced rationing of bread, a basic foodstuff that had always been freely available throughout the war years.

The Mass-Observation public opinion sampling organisation carried out a survey in which working-class people in south London were asked whether they would be prepared to give up some food to help people in Europe. ‘If it came to it,’ said one woman, ‘I suppose I’d do it as willingly as the next. But not to help Germany – only the countries that’s been overrun. I wouldn’t care what happened to the Germans – they’ve asked for it.’ ‘I wouldn’t go short on half a loaf to benefit Germany,’ said another.
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