Hitler's Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth - Don A. Gregory, Wilhelm R. Gehlen (2016)

Overture

Atwelve-year-old Hitler Youth single-handedly trying to save the Thousand-Year Reich from destruction in 1945 might seem a little far-fetched today, but it was not so far from the truth at the time. Millions of us had the same idea, but that is only a small part of what life was about during the last days of the war. As early as 1941, some food items were becoming scarce at home and in the final months of the war, most of Germany’s soldiers and civilians were hungry. Trying to save themselves and their families became more important than continuing to fight for a lost cause. After the war, Germans began starving by the thousands. It was a struggle for many just to find enough food to survive from day to day. This book is my small contribution to history as seen through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a small rural community just outside München-Gladbach, or M-G as those who lived there called it. I was barely a teenager when the walls of the Reich Chancellery came crashing down but some events are as real today as they were then.

I never learned English in school and my first teachers for that foreign language were American GIs who spoke everything from New York Yankee to Mississippi Rebel. My native language is German or more correctly, a lower Rhine German slang. I don’t have a high school education or a college degree in political science and I have never been politically active. I have never voted for any political party and do not support one now. I do listen to the politicians’ promises, but when the voting is over and done with, those promises all go out the window, whether we are talking about Washington, the German Bundestag, the Kremlin or some capital in deepest Africa. As I have said many times since I became an adult, the only honest politician I ever remember was Adolf Hitler. In his campaigning he said, ‘Give me five years and you won’t recognise Germany’ and he told the truth. The Germany of 1938 was nothing like the Germany of 1933 - but then the Germany of 1945 was nothing like the Germany of 1940 either.

Times were bad, much worse than just eating horsemeat or using discarded cement bags for toilet paper. Folks can get by without a broom or new clothes every year but one has to eat. Americans shouldn’t say that could never happen here, because in fact it did. The Great Depression of the early 1930s didn’t just happen in the United States; it was far worse in Germany and it had already been going on for a decade. Adolf Hitler promised us that things would get better if we would just elect him Chancellor. Contrary to what you may have been taught, we did have elections - and we elected Hitler, although maybe not quite fair and square by American standards of today, but by European standards of the time, it was not an unusual election. He got hold of the government in January 1933, the year I was born, and sure enough things got better almost overnight and kept getting better even after the war came. After the war was lost however, things were even worse than during the depression if you can believe it. Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich had only lasted twelve years, but for a young boy, twelve years is forever.

I want to describe in this book our daily life in the final years of the Second World War and shortly after. It was a time when the whole world went mad; when people in Germany lived on four ounces of rock-hard margarine and one egg per week and whatever else they could find that wouldn’t kill them if they ate it. It was a time when a simple broom handle would cost you practically nothing but you had to have three or four permits with stamps and signatures to get one - if it was available. Seventy-plus years is a long time to remember some of these things but they’re a part of my childhood and I do have some notes I made, and most importantly, I have my mother’s cookbook where she wrote down recipes that she tried and then tested on us. Several of those recipes are included at the end of this book.

There is an old German dialect proverb that translates as, ‘What a farmer can’t grow himself, he won’t eat’. Well, today, when food is plentiful, it is easy to pick and choose what you eat, but in the times described here, you ate what was available or you starved. Life was as simple as that and food was always on your mind. We ate without questioning what it was or where it came from. This however is not a gardening guide or a cookbook. It is the survival guide we created at the time to get us through another day. ‘Skinny cooks can’t be trusted’ is one of my favourite sayings today, but when I was a boy, you would have had a difficult time finding a cook who wasn’t skinny. There were new proverbs created toward the end of the war that reflected the times. ‘Altes Brot ist nicht hart, kein Brot, das ist hart’ was often heard. This is not difficult to translate even if you don’t know much German: ‘Old bread is not hard; no bread at all is hard.’

Just recently I came across an article in the Washington Post online that said that 40 per cent of US domestic food production is wasted and goes into the dustbin. A quick calculation tells me that this is food for about 130 million people out of a population of 300 million. Germany had eighty million in the war years, not counting the occupied areas. If Germany had wasted 40 per cent of its food production then, no German would be alive today to tell the tale. A few days after that article was published, another guru predicted an acute food shortage in the not-so-distant future, not only in the US, but worldwide. My advice is to get your shovels and hoes out now and make a garden. The food will taste better and be better for you.

Thousands of good (and bad) recipe books have been published and they look good as exotic decorations on kitchen bookshelves, but most are never read by anyone preparing the meals. After all, a can of soup or a bowl of Corn Flakes is much simpler. Good cooking takes time and skill. Books have also been written about essential vitamins one must have to live a long and healthy life, but we had none of these books in our house. Nobody in our family knew what a vitamin looked like. I have never seen one; neither have I ever seen a calorie. We were given cod liver oil that is supposed to be full of Vitamin A, but believe me, the stuff was awful. It tasted like fish gone bad and looked like snot. To us kids who had to take a daily dose of the stuff, it was public enemy number one. Amazingly, there was a never-ending supply of it right up to 1947. Allied bombers had no problem hitting blacksmith shops and railway stations, but no enemy bomber was able to pinpoint the Hell’s kitchen that made millions of gallons of cod liver oil. We kids, given the chance, would have told Winston Churchill right where it was and to bomb the place. In 1947, all of a sudden, supplies dried up. Why? We never figured that out, but nobody died of Vitamin A deficiency afterwards. Maybe all of us had enough cod liver oil stored up in our bodies to last a lifetime.

This is a true story and so I have changed some names and locations to protect the privacy of a few people still living among us. I should also like to point out that sometimes I might have the exact dates wrong but, remember, there was a war on, which was a common excuse for many things all over the world during those times. This book is not written as an exact historical reference, but as a bit of entertainment, black humour maybe; funny events - and at times, it’s simply the story of horrible-tasting food.

Wilhelm Reinhard Gehlen
Telford, Tennessee

It’s impossible to speak with Will Gehlen for very long without the conversation drifting toward something related to the war and food. I think this comes from his childhood in Nazi Germany when both were always on his mind. Today, most of us are familiar with disaster preparedness and food requirements in an emergency situation, but Will learned it first-hand. There were no books or movies or websites with vital information, and this was not a temporary emergency. It lasted for years. Things had to be learned by trial and error and they had to be learned quickly. Every able-bodied man, and by the end of the war, that meant young boys and old men, was at the front, even if the front was just down the street. It was left to the women to hold the home front together and that included feeding the children and keeping the house in one piece. Will’s stories are not unique; similar stories could be written about millions of Germans in small towns and in rural areas throughout Germany trying to survive after the loss of a war they had been told they would win.

Will recently came across a letter that describes the frustration the ordinary German farmer had with trying to survive while at the same time trying to support the government. The letter is from February 1943. A woman whose husband was in the military was ordered to deliver approximately 300 pounds of hay to the local Nazi Bauernschaft (Farmer’s Organisation). She wrote a simple letter of reply:

I received a letter from you on Jan 7, 1943 with a request to deliver 150 Kilos of hay to your organisation. This order I cannot fulfil. My husband has served in the Wehrmacht since February 1940. I have one cow to supply milk for six children, an RAD maid, and myself. That is eight people. I also have to deliver some of the milk to another twelve people by order of your office. I have two other cows not yet giving milk.

If I have to give the Bauernschaft 150 Kilos of hay, I cannot feed the cows and will be forced to sell them and have to buy my milk elsewhere, so I beg you to reconsider your demand.

Heil Hitler,
Amalie Pombergen

While times were hard for those in rural areas, they were much worse for those in the large cities that had been bombed constantly for more than two years. There wasn’t much left that could be called habitable and certainly nothing to eat. In Will’s community, there were people who had already endured one war and knew how to survive in desperate times. They became a source of knowledge for those trying to live through this one. These were the older parents and grandparents of children of Will’s generation. They often lived in the same house or in the same community as their children and grandchildren and could be counted on for support and advice.

Germany could have become a third-world country after the end of the war - and according to some highly-placed Allied officials of the time, that would not have been such a bad idea. The US soon backed away from the hard-line punishment of the entire country and repealed JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) Directive 1067, issued in April 1945. The directive was essentially the ‘Morgenthau Plan’, named for President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, and it called for Germany to forcibly be turned into a country of farmers with no capability of starting another war. There was as much hatred of the Germans at the time as there was fear of yet another war with them sometime in the near future. Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7 May 1945 and repeated the surrender on 8 May for the Russians. This gave the Allies complete control of the country and the Russians temporary control of Berlin, but to those who had survived the war, none of this was of any importance. Finding enough to eat to live another day was front and centre in everyone’s mind. The bombing had stopped, but the dying continued.

Whatever long-term treatment the Allies had in mind for the Germans, it couldn’t have been much worse than the conditions already in existence for them just before and just after the end of the war. The German economy and infrastructure was already a wreck and the inflation continued after the surrender with prices of essentials (if they could be bought at all) rising to double and triple that of 1943. Only the war industry continued to function reasonably well right up to the end. Parts of the intelligence-gathering section of the German military continued to function even after the war with the capture of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Will’s ‘uncle’, and a substantial portion of his command. In August 1945, they were transferred to ‘Box 1142’ at Fort Hunt, Virginia along with Gehlen’s vast microfilmed records. Gehlen can arguably be called the father of our CIA.

A year after the surrender, the situation for starving German citizens, particularly those in large cities, was not much improved. The de-nazification of Germany took priority, with anyone wishing to maintain a position of responsibility, such as teachers and policemen, having to undergo the process immediately before being able to resume their jobs. This was no more popular with the American GIs who had to implement the order than with the ordinary Germans who had to endure it. The Russians in particular did not bother with such details. They had other ways of dealing with those suspected of being former Nazis. Many Germans resented the Americans’ de-nazification treatment, as few of them were willing members of the Nazi party or had any political affiliation. A significant number of those who were members of the Party had joined under duress. The Allies, particularly the Americans and British, wanted the reconstruction of Germany to be a long drawn-out effort to allow ample opportunity to de-nazify the country in the process, and there was plenty of reconstruction to do. The almost unimpeded bombing had devastated the major cities, and the country was not able to produce enough to even feed its own citizens. More than 10 per cent of the total population had been killed during the war and agricultural output was barely a third of what it had been.

The German Red Cross was dissolved by the Allies immediately after the end of the war and relief agencies like the International Red Cross were prohibited from aiding the Germans with food and supplies. Even the Vatican was told not to interfere when an attempt was made by Catholic relief organisations to aid starving German children. Predictably, death rates rose among children to ten times that of pre-war Germany. The effects of the US-enforced starvation could not be kept quiet for long, however, and in early 1946 President Truman was forced by the public and their elected senators and congressmen to allow relief organisations into Germany. By this time, the entire population was on the edge of starvation, not receiving the bare minimum just to stay alive. The years immediately after the surrender were much worse than anything ordinary German citizens had experienced during the war.

With the realisation after the war that Stalin’s idea of democracy was to allow everyone to vote communist, the repeal of JCS Directive 1067 began to be called for in speeches by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and former President Herbert Hoover. They promoted the reestablishment of a government of some sort in Germany. JCS Directive 1779 in July 1947 was 1067’s replacement and permitted German economic recovery in order to stabilise Europe. This led to the ‘European Recovery Program’, more widely known today as the ‘Marshall Plan’. This was the first shot fired in what would become the Cold War. For young Will and his family and millions of other Germans, the ‘cold’ war meant something very literal. In the winters they were cold - and always hungry.

It was impossible to arrange this story in perfect chronological order because certain subjects would send my co-author into storytelling that would span the entire war and the years after. I have tried therefore to rearrange and group the stories around broad topics.

Special thanks go to Mary Chaires Damon, Samantha Jo Meiborg and Marjorie Miller for proofreading and commenting on the first drafts of the manuscript.

Don A. Gregory
Huntsville, Alabama