The German War (69 page)

By September 1943, 800,000 people had left Berlin. Over the coming months, until March 1944, a further 400,000 people were evacuated, as the population of the capital dropped from 4 to 2.8 million. By the end of the year, there were over six million German evacuees from the bombing nationwide. Many decided to leave in the immediate aftermath of air raids, even if their houses had not been hit. Whilst men were expected to assist in firefighting, rescue and salvage operations after the all-clear sounded, many women headed straight for their local reception centre. Staffed by municipal social workers and volunteers from the National Socialist People’s Welfare (the NSV), these centres provided first aid, hot drinks, sandwiches, emergency camp beds and an opportunity to immediately log losses and claim compensation from the municipal officials stationed there. They also registered those who wanted to leave. Given the acute housing pressure on the cities, the local Nazi Party and air defence associations encouraged the exodus. Would-be evacuees had to have the requisite departure permit, which would be issued only if they were not bound by a contract of employment. Without this permit, they would not be registered or issued with ration cards in their new abode. The requirement was only waived on the few occasions when the system collapsed entirely: the rarity of such cases – after the Hamburg raids of July 1943 and the raid on Nuremberg in August – itself offers striking commentary on the effectiveness of this decentralised way of organising civil defence and evacuation. Not surprisingly, men counted for a small percentage of evacuees: 10 per cent of 200,000 people who left from Munich, and just 5 per cent of those from Schweinfurt. Almost certainly the men who were evacuated had either passed retirement age or were disabled. If evacuation was aimed principally at children and women, it also divided women into two classes: those in work and those who were not, or, exceptionally, who were able to persuade their employers to let them go.
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The great majority – as many as 78 per cent – of evacuees were brought to safety by the mass organisations of the Nazi Party. This was true even of those who were able to rely on family networks and find their own accommodation. Women’s experience of the assistance provided by the NSV was often positive. As one woman from Karlsruhe recounted just after the war: ‘Everything was arranged and paid for. We got a slip of paper and were told where to go and when to leave. We were put up in the house of a woman who had a big farm.’ The stepdaughter of a seamstress in Münster had similarly positive memories of her evacuation – ‘and all was done by the NSV’, she recalled in 1945. Since the first wartime evacuations from the Saarland in the autumn of 1939, the People’s Welfare had prided itself on maintaining posts at railway stations, staffed by women volunteers who would dispense hot drinks and sandwiches. As the trains of evacuees came through, these volunteers were reinforced by members of the Nazi Women’s Organisation and the League of German Girls, who helped carry luggage, watch over children and find overnight accommodation.
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At times of acute overload, such as the summer of 1943, both the railway network and the volunteers were overwhelmed. The SD highlighted the story of one Hamburg mother fleeing with her three children. Arriving in the south, she was unable to obtain clean nappies for her 1-year-old baby. By the time she reached Linz in Austria, she and the children had nowhere to sleep but the floor of the railway station. Predictably, the children began to fall ill. The woman begged her husband to send her the money for her fare home, assuring him that the basement of their ruined house in Hamburg would be a ‘thousand times better than here’. Above all, she asked him to ‘Stop, wherever you can, the poor people from travelling to regions which lie in deepest peace . . . No one here in the Ostmark understands. I wish that they would get bombed here too.’ This was not how things were meant to be. Indeed, the fact that the story was relayed by the SD to the highest level of government indicates the regime’s resolve that such cases should remain the exception.
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By the summer of 1943, the Nazi evacuation effort was receiving support from one of the least likely sources – the Catholic Church. The Church had initially put up fierce resistance to the KLV programme to evacuate children, seeing the homes run under the auspices of the Hitler Youth as a gigantic exercise in anti-religious indoctrination. The suspicions of the clergy did not lessen but, faced with mass bombing, they dropped their opposition. In late July 1943, the chairman of the Diocesan Caritas Association for Cologne and Aachen praised the work of the National Socialist People’s Welfare and this new-won clerical support helped to turn this new phase of evacuation into a mass migration. Unlike the earlier KLV evacuations, stints were no longer limited to six months: they became open-ended. Without surrendering the voluntary principle or challenging the prerogative of parental consent, local Party and Education Ministry officials now embarked on the wholesale closure and evacuation of entire schools, with their teachers, from the end of the summer holidays.
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In September 1943, the Pestalozzi Gymnasium for Girls in Berlin-Rummelsburg was relocated to the Wartheland, where they took over the residence of a Polish count at Schloss Streben. Everything was improvised, and the girls were bitten by fleas from the straw mattresses they had to sleep on at first, before wooden bunk beds were built for them. They soon settled in to the structure of their ‘camp’, jointly run by the head teacher and the youth leader, who read them ghost stories at bedtime by the flickering light of kerosene lamps. The headmaster, now always dressed in his SS uniform, was relaxed, never bothering to censor the girls’ letters home or stop them from sliding down the bannisters of the grand staircase.
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With their boarding-school atmosphere and absorbing single-sex group dynamics, the KLV camps offered young teenagers an all-encompassing atmosphere which protected them from much of the social reality of the home front. They were out of the cities, often out of the ‘old’ Reich itself, and as an age cohort of 10- to 14-year-olds they developed an outlook steeped – just as the Church had feared – in the slogans and propaganda of the Hitler Youth. Keeping a diary in his KLV camp in the Bistritz area of the Hungarian–Romanian Danube, Friedrich Heiden was fascinated by the ethnography of the village: with its Hungarian shop; the small, round and squalid mud-brick huts of the Romanians and Roma on the edge; and, at the centre of the village, the spacious, stone-built farmsteads of the Germans grouped around the Lutheran pastor’s house and Protestant church. Much of the boys’ time was spent in organised activities, especially sport, war games and hiking. Designed to cultivate ‘comradeship’, the long days in the foothills of the eastern Carpathians seemed like an extension of the summer camps which the Hitler Youth had organised in the pre-war years. With its system of drill and ranks, marked out by the different colours of braid worn on the shoulder of the uniform, it was all meant to prepare the boys and girls for labour service or the flak. At Werner Kroll’s camp at Dürrbach/Dispe in Hungary, the boys were encouraged to duel with willow wands in the headmaster’s temporary absence: the Hitler Youth leader said it was ‘character-building’. A few days later, the boy Werner had beaten in his duel smashed the window of a Jew’s house. That night the whole group of thirty boys returned, throwing – Werner guessed – eighty to ninety stones at the house. They were not punished.
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In acknowledgement of the huge reversal of population movements, the formerly unpopular rural provinces of eastern and southern Germany were affectionately named ‘Reich air raid shelters’. Mass evacuation helped to alleviate the acute crisis of accommodation in the bombed cities, only to create a new one in small-town and rural Germany. A survey carried out in early 1943 by the People’s Welfare had revealed that most of the guest houses, hotels and monastic buildings in safe areas of the Reich were already full. In September 1943, for example, 1,241 evacuees from Bochum, Hagen, Berlin, Stettin and other cities arrived in Rügenwalde on the East Prussian coast, a town with 8,000 residents. As numbers of evacuees grew, locals became ever more reluctant to take them in, and the village mayor and local Party leader – often in fact the same person – had to exert ever greater pressure to find them lodgings.
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When 12-year-old Erwin Ebeling arrived in Lübow near Stargard in Pomerania, his group of women, children and teenagers was taken to an inn, where they were ‘auctioned off’ to the local farmers. Most wanted to have a woman with only one child, in order to derive most benefit on their farms. Erwin and ten other boys failed to find takers and had to sleep on bundles of straw in the swineherd’s house until families could be found for them. In Naugard in August 1943, no one wanted to take in 13-year-old Gisela Vedder and her sister. Finally, the mayor gave them a bed in his kitchen, where he also conducted his business. While he sat drinking with his visitors in the evening, the two girls hid under the covers. Unable to find anyone willing to intervene on their behalf, they decided to return home, setting off on a hot and dusty walk to the station, dragging their wooden trunk along behind them. In the Bayreuth district, two women and a child were outraged at having to share a tiny room while no one was prepared to offer them a warm meal. They returned to Hamburg in disgust.
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Mass evacuation may have been an organisational triumph. It was not, however, a victory of the ‘national community’. On the contrary, the experience of evacuation in particular would engender whole new areas of conflict within German society. Time and again, the refusal to share kitchens and laundries with evacuees became flashpoints of conflict, and local Party officials had to mediate. The Nazi Women’s Organisation and the People’s Welfare set about establishing sewing centres, communal kitchens and laundries to defuse these conflicts.
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It would take much more to engender any sense of affinity between evacuees and their hosts. Locals in Pomerania referred to mothers as ‘bombing women’ and called the girls and boys ‘shrapnel kids’, routinely blaming them for all acts of vandalism. In Bavaria, they shouted other, traditional insults like ‘Prussian sows’ at the girls as they marched in their junior youth league uniforms through the countryside. Evacuee women were accused of neglecting their children and carrying on with local men, a theme which soon found its way into the reports filed by the SD and the Catholic Church, two organisations united in mutual loathing and in their shared conviction that ‘loose women’ undermined social order and national morale. It was an accusation that had already been well rehearsed in relation to another group of single women – soldiers’ wives – and so it was a handy stone to cast at unwelcome intruders. In Swabia, farmers’ wives complained that the evacuee women would not even help with domestic chores like washing and mending, let alone with the fieldwork, even when all hands were needed to bring in the harvest. To them, the idle city women ‘seem to think that they should be waited on hand and foot, as in a hotel’. By contrast, to working-class women from Essen, Düsseldorf and Hamburg, the peasant women seemed ‘simple and stupid because they work so hard’, and they complained that there were no cafés, hairdressers or cinemas. In the Rhineland Palatinate, a young woman evacuated from Bremen with her young daughter found the unfriendliness of the farmers’ families in the village as difficult to bear as their cold and damp lodgings. Homesick and isolated, she wrote to her mother-in-law of how ‘the farmers don’t want to be visited. On some farmsteads, they simply slam the door in your face.’
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Representatives of Church and Party were soon overstretched trying to dissolve the social tensions engendered by mass evacuation. Catholic priests visiting women and children from the Rhineland in Upper Swabia in the autumn of 1943 reported that they spent most of their time ‘clear[ing] up difficulties, resentments, hostilities and incomprehension on both sides’. Most of the Catholic priests from the Rhineland were elderly men, who found the rigours of cycling around the villages to minister to their scattered flock physically exhausting. The priests were troubled that women in Saxony preferred to take the train to Dresden and Pirna to go the cinema and hairdresser.
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In the German Christian stronghold of Thuringia, evacuees from Barmen welcomed the arrival of their pastor, Johannes Mehrhoff, who visited 400 of his parishioners in seventeen different places. Serving as an information point, he passed on news and addresses of other evacuees, occasioning contact between people evacuated to different regions. Many women wrote back to express their thanks. For some, steeped in the pietist traditions of the Wuppertal, it was an opportunity to voice their own search for a religious meaning in an alien Protestant region. Others thanked him for the pleasure they felt ‘each time that a greeting from you and our dear ones in the parish at home reaches us’. One young mother who had been evacuated with her two small children wrote that ‘Then our hearts feel differently again, knowing that we are being thought of back home. Otherwise, it would be easy to give up, but this certainty always gives us fresh courage again.’ Thuringia proved much harder for the Catholic priests trying to minister to their Rhineland flock. Sometimes, they were picked up and warned off by police and local Party officials who shared local animosities towards the ‘Papists’.
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Beyond the clashes of city and countryside, and of north and south – with all their attendant cultural divisions evinced by different dialects, cuisine, religiosity and dress sense – the conflicts between the evacuees and their hosts also quickly developed a socio-economic dimension. Evacuees complained that local shopkeepers often refused to sell them goods, failing to grasp that they were also disturbing the balance within a food-rich but cash-poor countryside. Whereas a farmer’s wife with five children had to make do with between 45 and 60 marks a month, the childless wife of a white-collar worker had about 150 to 180 marks to spend.
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