The German War (23 page)

But there was a stigma. Women deemed guilty of ‘horizontal collaboration’ would find themselves amongst the principal targets of local violence during the Liberation. Those, like Aline, who had formed durable relationships and entertained Germans in the privacy of their homes, rather than casually meeting them in public places, faced particular condemnation and attracted a moral opprobrium from which most male collaborators, including those in positions of economic and political influence, were spared. This conviction that women’s bodies belonged first to the nation and only then to themselves encapsulated a certain kind of patriotism that was shared by the male-led resistance movements across Europe. It was shared too by conservative elites seeking to accommodate the Germans, and – when it came to German women back in the Reich – also by German authorities. Scorned and condemned by their neighbours after the end of the war, the women themselves retreated into silence and isolation. It was an act of trust and courage for Aline to uncover her memories of a long-censored love.
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In Denmark too, the presence of German soldiers made itself felt. Unlike defeated France, the German occupation was conducted under the guise of protecting the country’s neutrality and so young Danish men had not been incarcerated as prisoners of war. Nonetheless the young Danish fishermen in the west coast port of Esbjerg found themselves competing on an unequal playing field with the 3,000–4,000 German troops who joined the local population of 32,000. By early August 1940, the local police chief warned that there was general outrage among the town’s young men at the ‘German fraternisation with the young Danish women in town and the way this fraternisation takes place’. Unlike young Danes, the Germans had a lot of free time. Military drill aside, the life of occupying troops was one of profound idleness, with abundant opportunities for courtship, friendships and hobbies which they would have had difficulty pursuing in civilian life. When a group of Danish girls was interviewed shortly after the war, the most significant reason they gave for preferring Germans over Danes was that they had better, more courtly manners. A small number thought they were better lovers, showing, as one put it, ‘consideration for the soul of the woman concerned’. In line with the German attempt to exercise a model occupation in Denmark, local German commanders made a determined effort to hold their troops in check, issuing strict guidelines against accosting women on the street, for instance, and punishing rape severely.
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Like their colleagues in youth welfare offices in Germany, the Danes projected their general frustration with the increased sexual freedom of young women on to the one group they were authorised to control – teenagers. Determined to prevent an epidemic of venereal disease, moral corruption and prostitution, the police and welfare officials concentrated on picking up girls in parks, air raid shelters and near German military bases. In August 1940, one 14-year-old told police questioning her that it was unfair of them to pick up her and her friend and that she went with soldiers ‘because that’s what all girls did, now they thought it was fun, so why shouldn’t they?’ The pull of being taken to cafés, bars and restaurants became the stuff of peer-group envy and boasting about real or imagined exploits at school. One 13-year-old girl regaled her classmates with a tale of being locked in a room and given ice cream by the Germans. As fantasies of foreign abundance added to the allure of the conqueror, many young people were eager to kick over the traces which had constrained them in peacetime.
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Whereas the German occupiers did nothing to discourage sexual relationships in western Europe – indeed, in Norway, they were actively encouraged on racial grounds – the occupation of Poland began with prohibitions on contact with Poles, which were modelled on the Nuremberg race laws of 1935 forbidding all manner of relationships with Jews. Especially in the first months of the occupation, Germans openly flouted the bans, taking Polish women past the signs ‘Only for Germans’ which had been placed on the doors to bars and restaurants, and interpreting the ban as applying principally to Polish men. Although enforcement in some places became stricter by 1940, there was little to prevent any number of fleeting affairs between the 400,000 troops stationed in the annexed territories or the further 500,000 in the General Government. In ethnically mixed areas like Silesia and Posen which in the past had been ruled by Austria or Prussia, many Poles also spoke German and were willing to apply for registration as ethnic Germans in the new nationality lists, so easing subsequent applications to marry.

Moreover, those who were entrusted with enforcing the new ordinances – the 60,000 members of the German police and SS – were also counted alongside postal and railway officials amongst those who stayed longest and were most prone to put down roots. Despite the opprobrium heaped by both German officialdom and the Polish resistance on close and enduring relationships, among the many Germans found living openly with Polish girlfriends in their quarters were a considerable number of Gestapo and SS officers. In the Lublin office of the SD, Alouis Fischotter fell in love with one of the secretaries, Uszula B., and after lengthy personal negotiations with Himmler obtained his permission to marry and make their child legitimate. When Franz Maiwald, the head of the Gestapo in Zakopane, was killed by the Polish resistance in February 1944, his Polish lover, Maria T., wept openly at his graveside.
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For Ernst Guicking, it was France’s abundance that promised to rescue the newly-weds from the strictures of wartime rationing at home. In early August 1940, he was proud to send Irene a parcel of red and blue silk for her and some cloth to have a suit made for himself. Then came a knitted waistcoat, trousers, and 4 metres of the brown fabric for French uniforms: he advised her to have it dyed before having it made into overcoats. A comrade going on leave agreed to take this bulky package home. As Ernst requested Irene’s size in bras, blouses and panties, he had to find new comrades willing to bring his parcels home, and he had to ask her to send him more money for further purchases. Irene was grateful for both the attention and the garments but, with her practical eye, suggested swapping the silk for woollen cloth.
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None of this was easy for an ordinary infantryman. Drivers could send enormous numbers of parcels home by using their transport to consign them to the military post from different bases. A member of a flak battery in the Netherlands was able to ship back a valuable Philips radio by using their motor vehicles. Those with connections to the quartermaster’s department or the Staff section in Paris managed to bring home Persian carpets and fine china. A young actor at the German theatre in Prague wrote home to take orders for furniture and antiques, describing how one of his colleagues had set himself up as a dealer. This lively traffic was further aided by the abolition of the customs border between the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on 1 October 1940, which, according to one eyewitness, saw German officers’ luggage bulging with Czech ‘furs, watches, medicines, shoes, in quite unimaginable quantities’.
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Through the autumn, Ernst Guicking was only allowed to receive remittances of up to 50 marks a month, but for Christmas the limit was raised to 200 so he went on a further shopping spree, buying for the whole extended family. From a cash-poor family of farmers, Guicking let the money run through his fingers, asking Irene to send him more frequent sums, intent on a triumphant return at Christmas. At the same time, he had been encouraging Irene to take the lead in furnishing their home. Teasing her that he would spend the most time where he was most comfortable, he suggested she pay especial attention to their bed. Irene was entranced by the modern designs, and Ernst urged her to order only the very best, even if it meant asking to borrow 1,000 marks from her parents. But with long waiting lists for furniture and household goods, gratification had to be deferred. The population may have wanted to enjoy Continental peace, but the German economy remained on a war footing.
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Ernst Guicking’s spendthrift side was a natural response to years of suppressed demand in which Germans had saved because there was relatively little to buy. When Germany went to war, 20 per cent of economic production was allocated to armament and this had rapidly increased to over a third of GDP. Suppressed domestic demand led to high rates of savings. Through regulatory controls these private savings accounts were themselves silently redeployed by the government to finance the war effort, thus avoiding a repeat of the public appeals to buy war bonds which had been such a feature of the First World War.
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From the point of view of the German consumer, 1940 spelled a sudden bonanza, made possible by the fact that the Reichsmark was deliberately overvalued in each country the Wehrmacht occupied. For Germans, local prices were cheap and as families made good on what they could not buy at home, they started to strip consumer goods out of even the Dutch ports, still stocked with goods from before the occupation: in the Netherlands each soldier was permitted to receive 1,000 marks a month. In Belgium, German finance officials calculated that in the first year of the occupation 34 million marks was sent to soldiers stationed there. In October 1940, Hermann Göring made himself the champion of the German soldier – and consumer – by ordering that all restrictions be lifted on Germans buying ‘furs, jewellery, carpets, silks and luxury goods’, on the grounds that the victorious occupying troops should have the same opportunities as the local civilian population. Whilst controls remained firmly in place for sending parcels from Germany, Göring insisted that the military postal service should transport an unlimited number of parcels of up to 1 kilo in weight to the Fatherland. Within a year, the number of parcels being sent home from France had gone up fivefold to reach 3.1 million per month. Above all, Göring ordered that soldiers were to be permitted to bring home as much as they could carry themselves without interference from customs. Long discussions ensued about whether soldiers should be forbidden from strapping their excess luggage on to a carrying harness in case it prevented them from saluting their superiors. In any case, whatever restrictions were imposed on luggage were routinely disregarded. At the Gare de l’Est in Paris, hordes of German soldiers swarmed across the station concourse, staggering under inordinate amounts of luggage, bound for home.
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Apart from cash payments, the most common form of currency used were Reich Credit Notes. Although it was illegal for private individuals to use them, there were so many in circulation that a young soldier like Heinrich Böll had little difficulty arranging for his family to send him quantities of these Credit Notes. The reports filed by customs officials lift a small corner of the curtain behind which much larger and more ambitious trading operations were taking shape. In 1940–41, for instance, a group of employees from the railway postal service were discovered to be sending their empty postal wagon from Nuremberg as far as Metz, where they handed it over to their French colleagues along with tens of thousands of marks’ worth of Reich Credit Notes. Each week, the wagon returned from Paris filled with ‘scarce goods like coffee, tea, cocoa, chocolate, brandy, champagne, wine, spirits, clothes, stockings, etc.’ The Nuremberg employees sold on most of the goods to other postal workers, setting off a small chain of black-market activities.
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Coffee remained a particular favourite. In the 1930s the import and sale of coffee beans had been sharply restricted in Germany in order to safeguard the country’s scarce foreign currency reserves. Coffee substitutes had never gone down well with German consumers, and so it came as little surprise that when Heinrich Böll reached Rotterdam the first thing he bought was a half-pound of coffee, which had survived the incendiary bombing of the docks. Throughout the summer of 1940, he wrote home about his regular ‘coffee hunts’, interspersed with his ‘butter travels’. By September, the young soldier noticed that the shops were being emptied of stock and, although the Germans were paying for everything, it felt more like ‘stripping a corpse’. The German bank commissioner in the Netherlands agreed, warning that hoovering up goods would inevitably lead to inflation and entail ‘damaging political consequences for the rate of exchange’.
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The generation of Germans that grew up in the 1920s and ’30s had been taught to detest France but to admire and emulate French culture. If their
Blitzkrieg
victory purged their fear of French martial virtue, their cultural curiosity and respect remained intact. Hans Albring snatched all his free time in Poitiers to change into civvies and visit the local churches. His favourite was the thirteenth-century church of Saint-Radegonde with its red and brown frescoes of Lazarus rising from the dead and Daniel in the lions’ den. In spite of the summer heat and sore feet from climbing up and down the 218 steps from the barracks to the town and back again, he kept returning to the Baptistery with its altar, said to be the oldest in the whole of France. He sent postcards of them to his friend Eugen Altrogge, to give him a sense of what he was missing, and he even commissioned a local photographer to produce a large-format print of the fresco depicting the mounted Emperor Constantine. With some of his comrades Albring attended High Mass in the cathedral of St Pierre, where he was particularly moved by the Jubilate. As the choirboys’ treble voices resonated through the full height of the great building, Hans had an extraordinary sense of being lifted into the light of grace. He also noticed the deadly glances cast at him and the other Germans by the whole choir and congregation, and had the sense of being pursued by parochial hatred.
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Albring’s next posting was to Rouen, where he celebrated his promotion to sergeant and increase in salary by buying several rare books with valuable woodcuts. Leafing through the bookseller’s stock of prints and antiquarian books, Hans spent hours in happy conversation with the Frenchman whose views he found ‘very sensitive and understated. I notice how everything he says is well-founded and profound, registered with all his senses.’ Eventually, the young soldier popped the question of whether the French hated the Germans. ‘No,’ the bookseller replied, ‘and if they do, it is like a child’s tantrum.’ But, surely, Albring insisted, the ruined buildings of Rouen must provoke the ‘desire for revenge’? No, came the reply. What the French want is ‘to be left to get on with their work; to be left with their constitution and form of government’. This was as far as Albring could delve. Their conversation veered back to the safe topic of his passion for collecting prints of the old Italian and modern French masters. Before long Hans had put together a parcel of over 700 prints and woodcuts – salvaged from an early-seventeenth-century book – to send back to Gelsenkirchen with a comrade who was going home on leave. He was already planning how he could recoup part of the cost by selling some of these, no doubt to fund future purchases.
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