Life In Nazi Germany During The Way Flashcards
Early war life.
Very early in the war, the lives of German people weren’t impacted very heavily.
▪The only major difference was celebrations in the street after military victories. These celebrations helped increase Hitler’s popularity.
▪The army was conquering new lands and sending the spoils back home.
The Victories were such that they didn’t even need to propagandize them to increase support.
Rationing
Rationing was introduced as soon as the war started in 1939 to avoid shortages… which strangely resulted in a healthier diet for many Germans. During the First World War Britain’s naval blockade of Germany resulted in 420,000 deaths associated with hunger, the Nazis could not let that happen again.
• It wasn’t until 1944 that Germany experienced real shortages.
However, certain products such as meat and fats were soon in short supply and food consumption per person fell by 25% between 1939-1941. People were encouraged to use unfamiliar, more exotic products brought in from the conquered territories, such as aubergines, fennel and Jerusalem artichokes, but it proved difficult to change people’s tastes.
• Ingenious recipes were devised by special groups to make use of available products and parks and gardens were dug up and used for growing vegetables.
• It was not only food that was rationed: items such as cigarettes, soap, clothing and shoes were also restricted.
From 1942 conditions within Germany began to change – failure to defeat Russia sparked a downturn in fortunes.
▪ Food rations were strictly enforced.
▪ In 1939 each person was entitled to 700g of meat a week. By 1945 this was
250g.
▪ Public parks and private gardens were repurposed for growing vegetables.
▪New recipes and meals were created including the ‘daisy salad’ – you can guess the main ingredient.
Only those in heavy industry like mining or pregnant women could consume above the rationed amount.
Living standards
Despite the focus on war-preparation in Germany in the build up to 1939 the German economy wasn’t really ready for war. The Nazis wanted a war, but not until the mid 1940’s.
From the outset of the war there were different good prioritized and in shortage, so they were rationed.
• Food, clothes, soap and toilet paper were all controlled.
Rations though remained about 10% above the basic caloric requirements but were restricted to a very basic diet of mostly bread and potatoes. At the final stages of the war rationing became very strict and food shortages led to real hunger by 1945.
Consumer trade suffered badly, furniture and clothing sales fell by 40% & 25%, coal was reserved for industrial production meaning homes wouldn’t have heat. By the end of the war:
• Clothes were in very short supply.
• Leather shortages meant boots and shoes were hard to find. People started wearing wooden clogs
again.
• Small luxuries like magazines and sweets were no longer produced.
Air raids
May 30, 1932, Operation Millennium was launched.
▪ Over 1000 war planes were launched on Cologne in the biggest air raid in history (to date).
A year later, the ‘Dambuster’ raids on the Mohne and Eder dams resulted in 1000 civilian deaths by drowning. Two months later (July 1943)
July 1943 Hamburg suffered a similar attack, 50,000 people were killed.
▪ It was targeted again in August, two-thirds of the city was destroyed with death tolls estimated at 40,000.
▪ There were as many as 5000 planes above Hamburg at any one time.
In Feb 1945 Dresden suffered the worst of all the air raids just 12 weeks before
the end of the war.
▪1300 heavy bombers bombarded the city with 3900 tonnes of explosives demolishing nearly 13 square miles of the city of the city and killing 150,000 people.
Results
While military defeats were dampening the resolve of the German people, the Air Raids were having the exact opposite effect.
However;
• 400,000 Germans were killed, plus 60,000 foreign workers and POWs.
• 500,000 were seriously injured and disabled.
• 3.6 million homes were destroyed (about 20% total homes in Germany)
• 400,000 Berliners were made homeless in November 1943 alone.
•By the end of 1944 the German rail network had been practically destroyed.
While morale remained somewhat resolute, it is undeniable that air raids had a damning psychological and physical effect on the German people.
Total war labor increases
From 1942 the demand for labour extended with the move to Total War: • Working hours increased from 52-60 hours a week;
• Skilled labour was in serious short supply;
• Millions of foreign workers were brough in;
• Non-essential businesses were closed in 1943;
• All workers between 16-65 had to register for vital war work.
From 1944 as the situation became more desperate there was a total ban on holidays, bonuses were scrapped, and rewards limited to increased rations.
Role of women in the war effort
In the early years of the war conscripting women to work was used very sparingly. In fact, with declining consumer industries the number of women employed fell and conscripted soldiers’ families received benefits giving them less incentive to work.
As Speer pushed for total war, he wanted women to join the work force, but Hitler resisted wanting to maintain women’s traditional role and maintain civilian morale.
• Conscription for women aged 17-45 to the workforce only came in 1943. • There were many exemptions limited its impact.
Contradictions between Nazi ideology and the realities of war bogged down the war effort. It was only as the war effort started to get desperate that they finally mobilized a neglected work force.
• In the last 12 months of the war the conscription age for women was upped to 50. Eventually, women in cities worked long hours in arms factories, had to run their
households, running farms,
Eventually, a statement was issued… “It has always been our chief article of faith that a woman’s place is in the home – but since the whole of Germany is our home we must serve wherever we can best do so.
Rationing
Rationing had been introduced at the very start of the war in Germany – things like meat, bread, sugar and fats were restricted but food shortages were not a problem.
▪ Victories early in the war enabled the Germans to take control of new food sources.
From 1942 conditions within Germany began to change – failure to defeat Russia sparked a
downturn in fortunes.
▪ Food rations were strictly enforced.
▪ In 1939 each person was entitled to 700g of meat a week. By 1945 this was 250g.
▪ Public parks and private gardens were repurposed for growing vegetables.
▪ New recipes and meals were created including the ‘daisy salad’ – you can guess the main ingredient.
Only those in heavy industry like mining or pregnant women could consume above the rationed amount.
Fakers
To keep the illusion of a plentiful Germany, many shops displayed fake produce, like milk bottles full of salt to look like they were full of milk.
▪ Clothes were also rationed from 1939 – people who were suspected of having too many fresh threads would be visited by a Nazi official and their house raided.
▪ Soap was rationed – but people only received hot water on 2 days a week to save fuel, so this didn’t have a huge affect.
▪ Toilet paper was also rationed.
▪ From 1943 only military clothing was being produced – exchange centres were
opened to allow German people to swap clothes and other things they didn’t need.
A food and clothes black market eventually opened, trading luxury foods, perfumes and new fashions to those who could afford it.
Racial persecution
Policy towards minorities changed with the onset of the war.
▪ Jews were encouraged to emigrate until 1941 – most of those who had the means to leave did so. ▪ From 1938 the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration over saw this.
▪ Roughly half of German Jews left the country, but their emigration was banned from ‘41.
As the was progressed, more and more Jews came under German control.
▪ 3 million with the capture of Poland and many more with the invasion of Russia in June 1941. ▪ The huge rise in the number of Jews led the Nazi’s to believe they needed a new soluton. ▪ In 1941 the Jewish Department suggest a solution: The Madagascar Plan
▪ They would take all of Europe’s Jews and exile them to Madagascar
▪ The problem however was that the British Navy was blocking German ports.
A new plan was needed.
The Einsatzgruppen and Ghettos
Between ‘39-42 The Einsatzgruppen were a specialist group of SS men. They followed the advancing German armies and rounded up Jews in Poland and Russia.
▪ The Jews were then executed in their thousands and towns they lived in burned to the ground. ▪ Initially, they only targeted Jewish males but after August ‘41 they targeted all Jews.
▪ Usually, they were identified by local informants.
▪ They were usually round up and forced to dig their own graves before being shot dead, falling into the grave they had dug.
▪ Jews were also forced to live in Ghettos, particular areas of towns and cities where Jews were forced to live – there were particularly large Ghettos in Lodz and Warsaw.
▪ They were sealed with walls and anyone trying to leave was shot. ▪ There were more than 1000 of these areas created during the war. ▪ The Warsaw Ghetto had 400,000 people living in 3.4 square km.
▪ Rations in Ghettos were kept deliberately low enough to starve people to death while thousands more froze and died to diseases like typhus.
The final solution
In late 1941 Hermann Goring and Reinhard Heydrich were tasked with creating a new policy for dealing with the ‘Jewish Problem’.
▪ The two, along wit 15 high ranking Nazis met in Wannsee, near Berlin to create a final solution. ▪ It was decided they would create a series of ‘Death Camps’.
▪ These camps would be used to execute all European Jews.
• At the end of 1941, Hitler demanded an “aggressive policy” to rid Germany of the Jews.
On 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the Head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), held a conference in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin to discuss what the new aggressive policy should be.
• At this meeting, it was agreed that all Jews under German occupation would be brought to Poland, where those fit enough would be worked to death and the rest exterminated.
• This led to the horror of the Nazi death camps, six of which were built specifically to murder those brought to them.
• The biggest and most notorious camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 2.5 million Jews were murdered.
