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

Chapter 3. Rationing, Gardening and Preserving

Ration cards came into use at exactly 11:00 a.m. on 3 September 1939. The Reichsminister für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (German Food and Agriculture Minister - yes, there was one), Walther Darré, probably knew that the powerful British navy would somehow blockade our exits from the North Sea. This, of course, they did, but not only that; they also laid a mine belt covering all our exits to the Atlantic Ocean. Minefields were laid around Heligoland Island, the Faroe Islands, the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland, and in the Channel. The only uninterrupted exit for the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) was the Baltic Sea, but even that route came under enemy bombing as the war progressed. At first, rationing didn’t affect the German people a great deal, especially us out in the country. Most of the older people had lived through the great depression and inflation ten years earlier and had developed a sort of Selbstversorger (self-preservation) attitude. Those who ‘had’ traded with others who ‘had-not’.

Hitler’s aim in the early 1940s was to wage war with Russia and occupy the Ukraine, which was well known as the food-growing centre of Europe. Kornkammer Europas (Granary of Europe) as it was called. Yes, Germany was master of the Ukraine, but because of partisan activity and transport problems, the food situation didn’t get any better. When war came on 22 June 1941, millions of soldiers had to be fed; soldiers can’t fight on empty stomachs. So whatever was produced in the Ukraine in the summer of 1941 was mostly consumed by the troops. Some was sent home to feed the hungry population of Germany, and some was destroyed because of Stalin’s scorched earth policy. What was left over went to the general Russian population and POWs - if they were lucky.

Rationing was put into effect along the same lines as in the Great War, or ‘the war to end ALL wars’, as it was called by some political optimists. The years up to 1941 were relatively peaceful with regard to running a day to day household. In those early days of the war there was only a small chance of a British aircraft dropping a bomb on your kitchen table or into the bean stew but nevertheless, restrictions and ration coupons were already in place. Up and down Germany, in every city’s Wirtschaftsamt (economic office), pencils were sharpened and fountain pens were filled with ink for the anticipated flood of cards and applications to be signed. Many thousands of office workers were required to find a way through the maze of ration-card paperwork. They were mostly women, but some men too; who we thought should be at the fronts somewhere. We were sure NSDAP friends in high places got them their jobs. Corruption at any level, if proven, could mean the concentration camp, but it was rife in Germany nonetheless. We always suspected something fishy when a healthy-looking man stayed too long in a cushy job.

Yes or no was to be written on request forms authorising anyone to buy a tin of floor polish, fifty kilograms of lignite coal, or a bicycle inner tube. The Second World War turned rationing in Germany into a science. Long before 3 September 1939, ration cards had already been printed. There was a Wirtschaftsamt in our town, staffed by idiots whose job it was to write out permits for brooms, roof tiles, tap washers and sewing thread. It was in a big yellow building on Linden Street that got blown to bits during the February 1945 attack, and with it went all the permits and ration cards. The ration cards or coupons were in different colours for different things. As the war progressed, the items stated on the coloured cards became meaningless. A pound of pork loin on a dark pink card in 1941 could mean a pig’s ear in 1944.

The first two years of rationing weren’t so bad. Poland was overrun, next came Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Denmark and Norway, with booty aplenty to be taken. From France, we got household items and cotton materials. Holland and Belgium gave up vegetables and Denmark was a supermarket of all kinds of food. Norway had little enough for themselves, but Poland was flush with geese and chickens even after our troops were fed. Food parcels by the hundreds of thousands were sent by them home to Germany to feed their hungry families, and those families never had it so good. It was, as one German housewife put it, ‘like sitting under a horn o’ plenty’. Thousands of yards of coat, suit and dress material were sent home from France for busy housewives. Later on however, even sewing needles were rationed and hard to get. What we did get out of Norway was canned sardines and later in the war, Deuterium in the form of heavy water for nuclear research. This export ended when the so-called ‘Heroes of Telemark’ blew the heavy water plant to smithereens at the end of February 1943.

There were no real shortages early in the war, except of tropical fruit and spices that only grow in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, oranges and lemons grow in Italy and Spain and Rommel’s men in North Africa contributed a good deal of ship space to sending some of this citrus fruit home. Alas, we in our small village, far from Berlin, were the last in line and supplies regularly ran out before they got to us. Fortunately, vegetables, to my knowledge, were never rationed in our rural area, but there were shortages to come. If the greengrocer had no supplies from growers, the consumers had to grow their own or go without. Some, who had no garden or other honest means of obtaining vegetables, tried their luck at begging, stealing or maybe trading something for twenty pounds of potatoes. When harvest time arrived, there was food aplenty but many vegetables could not be grown in the winter, except for kale, leeks, turnips and rutabagas (Steckrüben) and we grew all of them. A leek for instance is one of the hardiest and most versatile vegetables you can find and it grows in Norway as well as it does in the Falkland Islands, providing of course you have good soil. They will still grow in poor soil but they are pretty skinny. The more manure, the more munch we used to say. You can even leave them in the ground during freezing weather, but you might need dynamite to get them out. Today you have to search long and hard to find a grocer who sells leeks and most gardeners won’t grow them as the seeds are not easy to find. If we had leeks, Mum could make a meal out of them and not much else.

The supply chain of food and other goods eventually came to a near-standstill and many shops only opened at certain times. Everyone carried shopping nets in their pockets when they ventured out, just in case a shopping opportunity came up. A long queue always meant something was available and whatever it was, we wanted some. I still have my net and use it shopping at the supermarket because it’s stronger and will hold more than those flimsy plastic bags that go into the rubbish. If word got around that something extra was available in a particular shop, and word did get around, a queue formed immediately. The added danger of getting shot at by a marauding fighter-bomber while standing in line for a half-pound of horsemeat, a pound of sauerkraut or a bar of soap was shrugged off most times because losing your place to seek a shelter of some sort usually meant doing without. The local bakery, before the war, could boast of having several bread delivery vans and managed to get the equivalent in horse-drawn wagons when petrol became scarce, delivering bread as far as fifteen miles away. Black bread, which is still sold to this day in Germany, came in foot-long loaves that were hard as bricks. We use to joke that if we had enough black bread loaves, we could build a bombproof shelter.

There were some things - mostly things you couldn’t eat - that were sold without coupons or ration points, such as sand-based cleaning items. Sand soap was a mixture of sand, pumice powder and smelly salts. Real soap, or what we thought was real soap, was sold only on coupons and it was called ‘swimming soap’. It wasn’t called that because you were supposed to take it with you swimming, but because there was so much air whipped into it that it floated. We were told this was a great improvement over other soap because you wouldn’t lose it in the bathwater. Even if Goebbels himself had told us that, I don’t think anyone would have believed it. The stuff was yellow and looked more like a miniature Swiss cheese than soap. There was also a Raucherkarte, a grayish ration card for cigarettes, but most cigarettes went to the fronts. What tobacco was left, usually home-grown, was dried, cut up using a Schwarzbrot (black bread) slicing machine, and rolled into cigarettes. They sold for 10-15 Pfennings each on the black market. Kippen sammeln (cigarette-butt collecting) became a pastime for many smokers. The shortage of beer and spirits, including wine, was aggravating for most adults. Of course, grapes still grew along the Rhine and Moselle, the Ahr and in the Pfalz, but getting the labour to pick them and then transporting them to the presses was the problem. Beer was diluted with water to the point it was impossible to tell what it was.

Food rations were reduced every six months almost from the beginning of the war. There were coupons on the ration cards that were valid for 50 grams of sliced meat or 125 grams of bread, and you used them quickly because the next card’s coupons might be for less. Salted lard was called Schmalz and it was shipped by the tons to the starving soldiers at the fronts, so at home we could only get a quarter-kilogram, about half a pound, a month. Buying sugar or anything similar, like flour, you had to bring your own paper bag, a triangular glued-together thing called a Tüte that held at most half a pound. These were made by Tütenkleber, ordinary common criminals that had been caught and put in the local jail. A sentence of six months or a year was a Tütenkleben and the prisoners were called the same thing. These criminals were different from hardened Zuchthaus (penitentiary) prisoners sentenced to hard labour. For anything you wanted to buy that had to be wrapped, you had to bring your own wrapping paper. One such wrapping paper, which was like our butcher paper today, was called Pergament, and it was used to hold jams and preserves - which were sold by the spoonful. If it got squashed by the sauerkraut and pumice stone, which were sold in paper too, you had a mess. Whatever items were not available on ration cards needed to be bought with a permit. These were issued by the local Wirtschaftamt.

Ration cards were printed in many fancy colours indicating what could be bought with them. A card for woollens and clothing, knitting yarns and so on was introduced in November 1939, usually with a total of 150 points on it; certainly not enough for a suit or a coat. There were normally seven different ration cards, but they weren’t all issued every month. Food ration cards were issued once a month, clothing cards every six months (or once a year later). Leather shoes were only sold on coupons and you could get one pair every eight months - if they were available, and they rarely were. You were in serious trouble if you wore out or outgrew your shoes. Other goods could only be bought using special Bezugscheine (permits), which had to be applied for at the Wirtschaftamt. If you wanted a broom, first you had to go to that office and wait in line to fill out a form asking you how many persons were in the family, how many rooms the house had, if you had carpets or a wooden floor and even if you had a vegetable garden. Then, if the inspector thought you were eligible, you were issued a ration card and told where to get the item. A different form had to be filled out for every item you wanted to buy, and just because you got the permit; that didn’t mean you got the item. Often it wasn’t available when you finally got to the shop.

Blue cards were for meat and sausages, which meant Wurst or even pigs’ knuckles, called Eisbein (ice leg is the literal translation) in German. There was nothing icy about it however; it had to be cooked, which usually meant boiling with sauerkraut. Generations have been brought up on it and even now it’s a delicacy in Germany. Yellow cards were for anything not classified as meat. Butter, margarine, milk and cheese came under it. Butter was scarce and margarine came in hard one-pound blocks. White cards were for sugar, jam and marmalade. Later in the war when it wasn’t refined properly, we didn’t get white sugar anymore; it came as brownish crystals, but the colour of the card didn’t change. During the heavy bombing raid on Julich, about thirty miles south of us, on 16 November 1944, an aerial mine exploded above a mountain of sugar beets, sending tons of them flying all over town. Not that it mattered much because Julich was almost completely destroyed by the attack. Fortunately most civilians had already been evacuated because the infamous battle of the Hürtgen Forest had already begun.

There were green cards for eggs, but people without chickens rarely got them except on the black market. Orange cards were for bread; they changed to red several times in the war, light pink was for Maizena starch, flour, tea or ersatz coffee, that, as the war went on, came to be called Neger Schweiss (‘negro sweat’) by a lot of people. Fish was seldom rationed and was sold while stocks lasted. There was always a fishmonger about with a barrel of salted herrings for sale. One thing that was particularly bad was a substitute for toothpaste which, according to people who knew, contained cigar ash, pumice dust, flour and a minty flavouring. It was made by Blendax and called Mint Max. The company still exists and they still make toothpaste, but I’m sure the ingredients have changed. Toilet paper was always in short supply during and after the war. Although not encouraged, the local newspapers, even those with Hitler’s picture, were regularly used. Late in the war when newspapers were only two pages, such things as empty cement bags were used and haemorrhoids became more common than the common cold.

The milk we got, when it was available, already had the milkfat removed so it wasn’t very nourishing. This non-fat milk was called Magermilk and even it got diluted later with water. This ‘leftover’ milk went sour in a few days without refrigeration and a sloppy white sediment called quark formed on the bottom of the container. We drained the whey from the curd and used this so-called cheese in many ways to supplement our meagre food rations. There was still protein in the stuff and that couldn’t be wasted. It’s an excellent diet food today, but nobody was on a diet during the war and right after. Fat people were rare and those who were fat usually wore a brown uniform and the only exercise they got was raising their right arm and shouting ‘Heil Hitler’.

There was never a real shortage of sugar for us during the war, but it was rationed. Germany had always had a flourishing sugar industry. The cool, wet late autumn climate of central and western Germany is an ideal place for growing sugar beet and refining factories worked full steam from October to early spring. Farmers lined up for miles with carts and trailers loaded with beets, waiting their turn to get to the washing ramp. After being washed, they were ready for processing and up until the winter of 1944/5, Germany still had refineries going full blast. These produced a lot of steam and during the war that was a beacon to enemy bombers. Germany had grown sugar beet as a major source of sugar since the late 1700s and by the middle of the next century; refineries were built for refining beet sugar on a large scale. By 1900, there were refineries all over Germany wherever sugar beet was grown. Nevertheless, sugar was rationed as part of Göring’s Four Year Plan. Sugar beet molasses (Rübenkraut) is still made today but during the war, it was our main source of sweetener. It has a taste similar to sorghum. Pumpernickel was made, like the famous German ‘black bread’, but beet molasses was used to give it that distinctive flavour. We spread this molasses on our sandwiches instead of sausage and other meats which were strictly rationed. Our name for these sandwiches was Kraut Lümmel (which can have a rather vulgar translation) and a generation of German children went to school with them in their satchels. Today this molasses is added to cookie dough to make a special cookie called Printen. Until late in the war, we could get Printen spice that came from the spice warehouses in Rotterdam, but when we could no longer get it, we made our own from a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, a half-teaspoon each of nutmeg that we ground ourselves, clove and Ingwer (ginger).

Soldiers on leave brought their own ration coupons with them and at times were given something extra. The NSV often gave scarce things to soldiers on home leave. At Christmastime, the soldiers who were fathers got everything the NSV women could manage for the children. My dad went into town during one Christmas leave and came back with a big bag of nuts and sugar cookies. Even on leave, soldiers were required to salute any officer, but most lower-rank soldiers quickly changed into their civilian clothes to avoid, what they called ‘Männchen Machen’ (standing on their hind legs, like a dog begging) many times a day. In civilian garb they had to conform like everyone else, seeking shelter in an air raid and obeying orders from air-raid wardens, firefighters and police. Many volunteered their services in emergency situations when out of uniform. Soldiers were called Landsers and most regiments were formed from local men, so the property and lives they were protecting were well known to them.

Almost everything had to be bought using ration coupons once the war with Poland began, but that was just a minor inconvenience at the time, as most everything was still available. That was not the case late in the war, but we at home were much better off than our soldiers on the Eastern Front. Our thermometer fell to -30°C (-22°F) in the winter of 1941/2 but in Russia, it fell to -40°C (-40°F as well) on a regular basis. A Feldpost letter from Dad reached us in January 1942.

Dear Wife, Dad and Children [Dad was Granddad Willem],

Thank you for your Christmas parcel. It got here on December 31, but I was unable to send you a letter earlier because the Fieldpost truck is frozen up. It is -43°C here. I’m now in a place called Selizharovo near a lake that is completely frozen. The ice is thick enough to hold up our tanks, if we can get them started. We have quarters in a Russian Kate [hut] and we are quite warm as it has an open hearth and we are surrounded by a forest that provides wood for the fire. Our field kitchen comes every day pulled by a Panje pony. We are only short of tobacco and cigarettes. The Wehrmacht Sondermischung cigarette brand is called ‘hand grenade’ here. You light one then throw it away quickly. If you can send some Halpaus or MB [Martin Brinkmann] cigarettes, please do so. There is no fighting going on here right now. Everyone is waiting for warmer weather. I hope you and the kids and Dad are okay. Please do not send me any more fruit. It was frozen solid when it arrived. Watch those boys and see that they stay out of trouble. I have applied for leave for White Sunday in April and I’m pretty sure our commanding officer will grant it.

Peter has written from Königsberg and says that he is getting married to a local girl named Gisela. This will probably not go well with Aunt Trina as Gisela is a Calvinist and you know what Aunt Trina’s family is like. Well, it’s Peter’s life and I wish him good luck. I must end here. I’m on guard duty until 4:00 a.m..

Best wishes and kisses to all of you.
Lou

By the summer of 1944 there was also a general type of hoarding going on. Those people who still believed in a final victory were getting to be fewer and fewer. The prevailing mood was doom. Not many were convinced that the V-weapons were having much effect, even though every night after the Normandy invasion we heard on the radio, ‘The bombardment of London and southern England with our V-weapons continues with devastating effect’. Well, a few V-1s never made it that far; one went down in a village next to ours that summer, missing a house by fifty yards but hitting a chicken coop. For many that meant no eggs for a while until they got more chickens from somewhere. We got a letter after Easter from an aunt in Fulda who, despite having an egg ration card, hadn’t received even one egg in three months. She went on to say that she hoped there would be some by Easter next year. She didn’t know that Easter 1945 would be even worse. None of us did.

We had no real coffee until after the war, but the older women often talked about Bohnen Kaffee or coffee from coffee beans and I wondered what it was. The tea we had was not very good and it was even worse when sweetened with beet molasses. I don’t know it for a fact, but I bet acorn and barley coffee was invented in Germany during some war. There was even a specific name for acorn coffee. It was called Muckefug and it tasted much better than the name sounds to an English-speaker’s ears. Whoever invented it should have been awarded a medal because both were pretty good substitutes. It required some imagination to figure out that barley or wheat could be roasted and ground into powder and brewed - but acorns? Now that really took some creative thinking. I wonder who first tried this and didn’t suffer any health problems. Once it was manufactured, it was drunk all over Germany, except maybe at the Berghof. Late in the war, it was available without ration cards and it continued to be available after the war until about 1948. We had to bring our own paper bags to put it in after 1946.

Brother Len came up with the idea of making our own acorn coffee. There were plenty of oak trees in the area, but I had learned by this time to be wary of Len’s hare-brained ideas, especially those that involved things to eat or drink. Arguing with him was pointless, so one weekend in the autumn of 1946; we collected about five pounds of acorns that were reasonably dry. He put about a pound of them into a cast-iron pot. We had no fat, only some strips of bacon and some beef tallow that looked like candle wax to me. Soon his ‘roasting’ process started to crack the shells and they were removed from the pot. After another thirty minutes, the acorns were turning dark brown and splitting. A few minutes later the acorns were black and producing an acrid smoke. He gave his roasting operation another thirty minutes and declared the acorns to be done. Alas, that was another idea of Brother Len’s that did not work out. The roasted acorns were too large to go into the coffee grinder so he put them into a heavy cloth bag and hammered them into smaller pieces. We then ground them in our coffee grinder. Mum made one pot of Len’s coffee and threw it out.

Another simple commodity that was unobtainable by people was cement. How could one mend a hole in an outside wall without cement? All houses in Germany were built of brick and there are still brickyards all over the country. Hundreds of years ago most houses were built of timber framing, then sided with either oak or willow slats. This was then plastered over with a mixture of straw, cow manure and lime. In 1938, we lived in a house built like this while ours was being re-roofed. That house was disassembled long after the war and re-erected as part of an open-air museum in Kommern in the Eifel Mountains. It’s still there today and can be visited all year round. Repairing a damaged brick wall without concrete during the war used the same recipe developed two 200 earlier: straw, cow manure and lime. The patch would absorb bullets and shrapnel quite well. Roofs were made of clay tiles and to stop drafts and keep out the rain, each tile was bedded on straw matting.

Broken windows were a constant inconvenience because there was no replacement glass to be found anywhere. A piece of thin plywood served as a good substitute. Shop windows in the city were boarded up with planks. There were very few cases of looting after a destructive air raid. The penalties if caught were very harsh; even summary execution by a firing squad. The only thing that was permissible to take away was broken or partially-burned lumber for heating or cooking purposes.

Cotton was another item in short supply in Germany. Any old, torn, or worn-out cotton garments were collected and taken to a Reisswolf (now the name of an international company that provides document shredding), a machine that ripped the material to shreds. The fibres were then re-spun, dyed, and delivered to the weaving factories. Even paper was mixed in late in the war and shirts would be worn until they literally fell off your back. Washing them was a bad idea as they just disintegrated. This was called ersatz cotton but it wasn’t much of a replacement for the real thing. After Granddad Willem died, we didn’t have anyone who knew how to make the wooden clogs we wore, but Brother Len found his tools and decided he could make them as well as Granddad. After all, he did know everything. His attempt went into the fire that cooked a pot of stew that night.

Spices were no problem during most of the war. We occupied Holland in 1940 and the Dutch owned a vast empire in South-East Asia now called Indonesia. There were huge warehouses in Rotterdam full to the roofs with all sorts of spices. Indonesia is still a main source of the world’s spices. Nutmeg came in nuts and we had a very fine grater that worked well. Try a sprinkling of nutmeg in your mashed potatoes with a bit of dried parsley. You will be surprised at the delicious taste. The Germans love their spices. About forty years ago, on a visit to England, I observed that the average British kitchen spice rack consisted of salt, pepper, vinegar, a jar of Marmite and ginger. Times have changed since then, and even in the United States spice racks are overflowing with exotic spices, most of which are never used. I think the spice racks are mostly used as decorations for the kitchen.

Honey was unavailable and I never knew why. Surely we were not training artillery bees to fight on the fronts, although we would have if it could have helped win the war. We had our share of blooms on things and plenty of bees, so what happened to all the honey? Maybe it also went to the war effort. We did have a replacement, no doubt invented by some scientists in the food ministry. It was called Kunst Honig, which literally translated means ‘art honey’. I have no idea how it got that name unless maybe there was an art to making it. ‘Ersatz Honig’ would have been a better description of this stuff that came in two kilogram blocks that had to be cut with a sharp knife into thin slices. The texture was grainy, like pumice powder. It sort of tasted like pumice powder too. It was yellow and smelled like honey and was sweet, but there the resemblance ended. If there was pumice in it, we didn’t suffer any effects from eating it. ‘Dreck scheuert den Magen’ (‘Dirt scrubs your stomach’) we used to say.

If you wanted a good meal and had a little money, you might think eating in a restaurant was a good idea, but they were supposed to follow rationing regulations too. Some places were in operation throughout the war, but to get a meal, and these were not elaborate, one had to have a ration card with food points. The price of meals varied depending on the location and food availability, but in general they were cheap. What made it frustrating was that the point system was displayed right on the menu next to the price. A new term came into being in restaurants, Flüster Menü. Simply translated, it meant ‘whisper menu’. If you did not have enough points for a certain meal, the waiter whispered into your ear that for certain favours, he could add an egg to your fried potatoes. A few Reichsmarks, a cheap bottle of wine or a bar of good soap would usually do the trick. The Gestapo soon put an end to this enterprise. They sent plainclothes agents into the restaurant and any waiter or restaurant owner selling Flüster Menü meals found himself behind bars and the place was closed down. The sign on the door might say ‘Wegen Einberufung geschlossen’, but this time it was not a call to arms, but a call to court and maybe prison.

The meals in restaurants were not much different from those we had at home. During my visit with Mum to the Bottrop Military Hospital to see Dad, we went for lunch to a restaurant after an air raid was over. The fare was fried potatoes, sauerkraut, a slice of bread with Schmalz, and a cup of ersatz coffee to wash it all down. No ‘whisper menu’ was offered to us. We probably looked like we couldn’t afford anything they had.

Rationing was hard during the war, especially for those with no spot of ground for a garden, but it was even harder after the war. The wartime proverb that went, ‘enjoy the war because the peace will be terrible’ certainly came true for most of Germany. For many, only the shooting and bombing stopped in May 1945; the dying went on.

* * *

At home, gardening was a must. If you had one, you worked in it and if you couldn’t, you let someone else have it to grow food. We had a rather large garden, which wasn’t to my liking because the constant digging, watering and weeding took all my free time, but then I realised if I didn’t do it, I would go hungry and that’s what happened to those who wouldn’t work. One year a few kale, broccoli and leek plants managed to avoid being eaten long enough to go to seed, but we didn’t have anywhere left to plant them. Brother Len had the grand idea of digging up the local football field. By 1943, all the young teenagers in the area had been called up to serve in the Hitler Youth flak battalions and the older ones were at the front helping the hard pressed old Landsers stem the Russian tide that was rolling relentlessly westward after the Stalingrad debacle. Permission was requested and given for us to work the field, but digging was easier said than done. It had been laid out in 1904 and years of trampling all over it, every weekend, by dozens of teenagers had made the ground as hard as concrete. In places, not even weeds would grow.

We used a pickaxe the first few days until a group of fighter-bombers (there was a railway track alongside the field) unintentionally gave us a hand. The pilots must have thought the soccer field was a convenient place to drop a few bombs. Of course, they missed the railway track, but four bombs hit the soccer field. Now, everyone thought, we had to fill in bomb craters as well as dig up the ground. Brother Len threw his shovel down in disgust, ‘Look what the swine have done now,’ he shouted.

‘Never mind Len,;’ I said, ‘look at it this way, these four craters are loose soil now, all we have to do is fill them in and start planting, no digging. I hope those P-47s come back for a second helping and plough this field over and over again for us.’ No one ever worked harder for a few vegetables.

We pickled everything that could be pickled and some things that probably had never been pickled before. There were successes and some downright failures that we couldn’t eat and were pretty sure were poisonous. We pickled gherkins, onions and plums. Vinegar wasn’t rationed but sugar was and you need a little sugar to take the sour edge off some things. Mum used to boil her vinegar mixture with a little sugar added, about half vinegar and half water and she used lots of dill from our garden; peppercorns too if we had any. Dill was something that every gardener grew and it was often added to anything being pickled for extra flavour. Ready-to-use bottled vinegar was not sold; it came as a strong vinegar extract in small bottles and had to be diluted with cold water. The stuff was highly toxic if not mixed with something. It’s still sold in some shops in Europe as Essig Essence, or concentrated vinegar. Rich people diluted it with champagne to make things preserved in it tastier.

All food, cooked or raw, will go bad if not preserved properly; some will spoil in a day, some in a few days. That didn’t happen very often during the war. If we had a surplus, like at autumn harvest time, we preserved it one way or another. Cabbage and beans went into a 100-litre (about 25 gallons) earthen jar. Enough salt preserves just about anything but it might smell so bad you can’t eat it even after it has been soaked in fresh water for a day. We also dried vegetables and herbs on strings hung in the sun. After they were thoroughly dried, we packed them in pillowcases and hung them from wires attached to the rafters of our shed to keep the field mice from pilfering. Root vegetables like carrots, turnips and potatoes were stored in straw in our air-raid shelter. This shelter was only about ten feet by twelve feet and an adult couldn’t really stand up in it, but it could hold a lot of food. Entrance was through a wooden trapdoor down some steps. An emergency exit to the road side of the shelter was added in 1939 by order of the local Reich Shelter Inspector (yes, there was one of those too). We never used the shelter for its intended purpose. We figured that if the house took a direct hit from a 500lb bomb, the shelter would not do us much good anyway. One side of the shelter had wooden shelves that Granddad Willem had built after the First World War. These shelves held glass jars filled with preserved vegetables, meat and fruit, and they were all lined up by size like Storm Troopers on parade. Brother Len loved to do things in a military manner, even if it was putting glass jars on shelves.

Preserving in glass jars was the best way to keep food but Einkochen (canning) was a tedious job. We didn’t have pressure cookers or screw-top lids with seals on them. Our glass jars used a rubber sealing gasket and glass lids held down with a metal clamp. After the jars were filled, they were placed on a trivet that held six of them and lowered into a large pot. Cold water was added and the pot was placed on the cooking stove. Sometimes, depending on the contents, it would take several hours heating before the lids could be put on. The temperature throughout the food in the can had to be high enough to kill any bacteria. In the summer, the kitchen was turned into a sauna when canning had to be done. Most people didn’t mind the work and heat because they knew that, come winter, there would at least be food in the house. Government food rations were reduced in late 1942 to just 1,600 calories a day and if that was all you had to live on, you went hungry most of the time. The promised food bounty that we were told would come from our occupation of the Ukraine had not materialised. The miles of Russian grain had been ploughed under by tanks from both armies or blown up by artillery shells. Our soldiers, who were supposed to live off the land in Russia, found only devastated countryside where even a live goat or chicken was a rare sight.

Food will keep practically forever as long as it is preserved correctly in airtight glass containers. In 1943 we ate strawberry preserves that had been canned by my mother in 1919 and they tasted as good as food we had preserved the year before. With commercially canned food in metal containers, the story was very different. The metal cans were lined inside with zinc which would oxidize after a year or so. The outside of the cans would rust through to the inside even if they were kept dry. After the war began, there weren’t many metal cans because anything metal was needed for the war. Clay pots were used for preserving cabbage and beans, but that had its limitations too. We had fruit trees and bushes but not much sugar for making jams or jellies. A few pounds of preserving sugar were issued each fruit harvesting season, but the sugar didn’t dissolve very well because the crystals were the size of grape seeds.

Granddad Willem pushed Brother Len and me to put every effort and ounce of our energy into our garden. That of course meant more digging and back-breaking labour, mostly for me. Len had a knack for avoiding hard work and, although I argued with him about it, if it came to a physical disagreement, I usually ended up on the losing side. When certain food became impossible to get, I got interested in gardening, cooking, and recipes that used what we had. Unlike Brother Len, who would only work in the garden if he had to, I was a nature person. We had a large garden with access from the house through a covered shed and from a gate on the road. There was a pigsty in the shed too, but we rarely had a pig. We also had several fruit trees and berry bushes: pears, cherries, plums, blackcurrants and raspberries. To have a good garden and grow plenty of vegetables, however, you needed a manure heap. A good manure heap was the pride of any real gardener. A farmer’s wealth was judged by the size of his manure heap, which was usually situated next to the front door on the roadside, preferably under the kitchen window, or by the side of their slurry pits. We grew up with the smell and thought nothing of it. Plastic had been invented but it wasn’t used for household items, so most of the household garbage could be composted.

We had no pesticides to control garden insects during the war and the German butterflies, caterpillars and other vegetable-eating critters probably didn’t know there was a war on because they kept right on multiplying and eating their fill. It was a never-ending job keeping these pests away from our garden. After the war, the potato supply went from bad to worse because of this bug and schoolchildren were given candy bars for each glass jar of them or their larvae they collected and brought in. We were told that the Allies dropped the beetles during and after the war to destroy crops. All we knew was that we had never seen them before the ware. One summer we had an attack of Blackfly on our Fava beans. The bean flowers shrunk and the tops of the plant that normally were picked and cooked like spinach were useless. This wasn’t just a bother; it could very well have meant we would starve, so Brother Len came to the rescue with another of his great inventions. He first tried hot water with soap and cod liver oil mixed in. I was hoping this would work because it would mean there would be less of that awful-tasting oil for Mum to give me. The flies loved the stuff and continued to multiply like crazy. Next he tried ashes from our oven but all that did was turn the flies grey. His last try was gunpowder which was stored in quantity in a few ammo bunkers near us. This was getting downright dangerous and I told him so, remembering what had happened when my mother threw my tobacco tin full of gunpowder into the fire one day and blew a pot full of bean stew all over the place. Len sprinkled the gunpowder between the rows of beans and then held a match to it. The result was a flash, singed eyebrows and hair, and burned plants. The black flies were gone, but so were our beans. We finally asked Aunt Maria for advice. She wasn’t really our aunt but the wife of one of the local farmers we knew well. She was a sizeable woman with arms the size of tree-trunks and a first-class cook. When she was younger, she had a huge garden and grew Fava beans by the bushel. Her advice was sound and it worked; plant the beans in rows, but plant onions between each row. The onion smell (or something about them) keeps the flies away. Incidentally, this trick also works against carrot flies.

In 1943, rationing of seeds for most vegetables was introduced. I remember going into town to purchase white cabbage seeds, leek seeds and seed potatoes. First I had to show a permit from the local Wirtschaftamt, stamped and signed of course, confirming that we had a garden of about half an acre. Then I received seventy-five cabbage seeds, counted on the spot and not one more than seventy-five. Leek seeds were pre-packed, fifty in each pack, and I got one pack. Another separate permit was required for the seed potatoes. We got ten kilograms (about twenty-two pounds) and were told to cut them in half before planting. That was plenty for us as we always kept a few potatoes from the previous season for seed. Carrot seeds were sold in packs; probably the seeds were too small to be counted. We also got a half kilogram of onion sets (a little more than one pound) and no more. When you received your ration of seeds and plants, your name and address was recorded in a ledger indicating you had received your allowance and you got no more. Sometimes friends would not need their entire ration and would share with you, but no one had surplus seed potatoes. What you didn’t plant went into the stew pot.

All that digging and sowing was no guarantee of food to eat later on. Insects, birds and bombs took their share but the most worrisome were the thieves who would come at night and dig up your vegetables and haul them away. If caught, the thief would get at least three months in jail; no fines, because money was worthless without ration cards or coupons. In extreme cases, the thief would find out what hard labour in Sachsenhausen was all about. We had no pity on these parasites that preyed on the hard-working members of our community. Few people got caught because word soon got around that this would not be tolerated and that those who did get caught would find no mercy from the authorities.

One of our favourite vegetables, apart from leeks - you can’t eat leeks all the time - was called Kappes in proper German. It’s called Kohl and Kraut in common German speaking, and cabbage in America. There is also of course, sauerkraut, a fermented white cabbage, which is easy to make at home. All you need is a stone jar, salt and the cabbage. Then there is another delicacy, which is boiled red cabbage; in Germany it is called rot (red) kraut. There is grün (green) kraut too. Rüben kraut (Zuckerrüben-Sirup) is a molasses made from sugar beets and apfel (apple) kraut is made from apples, and it has a rather sweet-and-sour taste. Then there was ‘Kraut’, ‘Jerry’ and ‘Fritz’ which were names given to us by the American, British, and Russian soldiers.

Sauerkraut is easy to make but I’m not fond of it anymore. I think I had too much sauerkraut soup in 1945. In our area, there were many acres planted with kraut and the ‘have-nots’, that is, those without a garden, would board the slow-moving local train that wound through the fields connecting the small villages. This train collected the farmers’ cabbage and people would jump off the first car, cut as much cabbage as they could carry, then jump back on the last car. We gave the train the name, the ‘Kraut Express’ and it only went about fifteen miles per hour so it was pretty easy to steal enough to make a meal for a few days. Before the war, this was just an everyday occurrence and no one bothered trying to catch the thieves, but later in the war it became a serious offense.

I hung around the kitchen stove when I wasn’t in the garden and watched how things were being cooked. True German cooking is a slow process even today. American-style fast-food restaurants have sprung up in major German cities but many people still cook at home and use the old recipes handed down over the decades. I suppose this has something to do with the lean times that have been experienced in most of Europe, particularly in Germany, since the Thirty Years War. Going back in history, at least two major wars were fought in that part of Europe each century. In the kitchen, I often I got in the way so much that Mum would chase me out. She was unable to do any garden work with Baby Fred on her knee and housework to do. Dad was in the Wehrmacht and Brother Len was an idle swine when it came to work at home, so I was responsible most of the time for the garden and the animals. Even though a good garden needs plenty of sunshine, after the spring of 1943 we prayed for overcast skies to keep the fighter-bombers away. I think the men who drove the ammunition trucks prayed hardest of all. I guess it was no fun driving a truck loaded with several tons of explosives through populated areas while being shot at from above.

Eating frozen potatoes is not everyone’s idea of food, but in the First World War and also in the Second when potato storage was a problem in harsh winters, something had to be done with them and they were certainly not going to be thrown out. Potatoes were stored either in straw clamps (mounds) in the field they were harvested from, or bagged and stored in barns. Both were favourite targets for low-flying attackers, however. Clamps didn’t burn and if one was hit by a bomb in the winter, there would be a free-for-all potato raid, but in -30°C weather, they would freeze in minutes. Waiting for them to thaw out was a bad idea. They rotted immediately and then you really could not eat them. Some old veterans from the First World War who had spent winters on the Galician Front had learned from Russian POWs what to do with frozen potatoes. First of all, they have to be prepared while still frozen and it’s no use trying to peel them. They were boiled in salt water and mashed up. To me, they had a rather sickening sweet taste, and to overcome this, we added plenty of spices and whatever other vegetables we had. We also made a type of hash brown potatoes called Schnibbels Kuchen, which sounds rather exotic, but the only thing exotic about it was the spices. They are made with grated potatoes, grated onions, one egg (per three potatoes), parsley, fresh chopped leeks, salt, pepper, nutmeg, powdered clove and a tablespoon of cornflour, all mixed together. There is one additional spice that is found in every German kitchen that should be added. It is actually a mixture of spices called by the trade name ‘Aromat’ and a few shakes will do wonders for the taste of anything that hasn’t much taste of its own. This potato mixture can be fried in a frying pan as a whole flat cake or as smaller cakes. Slow frying until brown and turning over a few times is recommended. The cakes are really good with apple butter and cinnamon.

Even the smallest potatoes were used during the war and after; none were wasted. The marble-sized ones were fried whole with onions and the peelings from the bigger ones were washed and turned into potato cakes. In mid-1947, Dutch potato farmers trucked untold tons of their yellow variety into western Germany to help feed the starving population. The Dutch called them something that translates to ‘Earth Apples’ and this yellow variety is still the main potato grown in Germany today.

A simple potato soup can be made with one medium-size beef or pork bone, or even a pig’s tail. Boil this for half an hour in salted water and then add a grated potato and chopped leeks. Boil for another half hour and sprinkle fresh parsley in the soup just before serving. Pig ears were boiled overnight on a low heat in lightly salted water with a tablespoon of vinegar added. They were then either fried or added to a stew. Fried, they become very crispy like bacon or fatback and are very good for breakfast or in a sandwich for lunch. Potato roasting became a way of life in those days and it was the cheapest way of having a meal. Deep-fat frying had not come to Germany, and besides, nobody had enough cooking oil to do it. There were many other ways, however, to prepare potatoes even with limited resources. Most housewives had a clay crock in their kitchen for household fats. This fat was usually a mixture of whatever was available. Ours was rabbit, beef, pork, and sometimes chicken. Without a refrigerator, this fat would soon start to go rancid, especially in the summer but we used it anyway and would disguise the smell with leeks or spices. I doubt if there are many housewives or chefs today who are as inventive as the Germans were during those times. Today, if the result of a new recipe isn’t very good, it goes into the dustbin. We couldn’t afford to throw any food away and every trick was used to make it edible. Spices would cover up a cooking disaster and we knew that if we didn’t eat it today, we would find it back on the table the next day or even the day after that.

One of our must-have kitchen utensils was a hand-operated grinder and you can find them today at almost any flea market or antique shop. I still have one and use it almost daily. I know there are modern kitchen gadgets by the score that will do the same thing without turning a handle, but on those modern machines I only know where the on and off button is, the rest is a mystery to me. We had five grinders in the kitchen for everything from meat to coffee. It was operated by holding it between your knees. We ground everything - except coffee beans. There were none for most of us late in the war, although probably the high society of Germany had some. Our coffee grinders were used to grind dried peas into powder, or hard Kandis sugar into manageable sugar granules. Our meat grinder came in especially handy making vegetable cakes from dried peas, beans, or lentils.

* * *

There was always a shortage of rubber and it only got worse during the war, so the Germans made their own based on a 1908 discovery by an IG Farben scientist named Hoffmann. The new rubber was called Buna. The Buna Works near us in Marl Hüls was built to make this valuable stuff for tracked or wheeled vehicles. Tracked vehicles used a great deal of rubber and it had to be tough. Synthetic petrol plants were soon built in Leuna-Merseburg, Marl, Ludwigshafen, Gelsenkirchen and other places, making petrol and diesel fuel from coal. Twelve refineries were in operation in the Reich by 1940. The whole Ruhr area has one of the largest coal deposits on earth, but no oil. There are no coal mines in operation there now. Germany buys coal from Poland, Russia and China. By the time the oil fields in Romania were targeted by the Americans, German synthetic petrol production was in full swing. Once they established their huge bomber fleet of B-17s and B-24s in England, bombing priority was given to eliminating the German synthetic petrol plants, but it took them until early 1945 to put the Leuna plant out of production for good.

Coal was strictly rationed because it was needed by all the war industries. In the winter we got about a hundred pounds a month and there were also briquettes made of compressed lignite coal which was abundant in our part of Germany without deep mining. It wasn’t a good source of heat but the briquettes would burn for a lot longer than the same amount of wood. We carted coal dust home from the local coal yard throughout the summer and autumn whenever it was available. We mixed the coal dust with anything that would burn, like bits of paper, cloth and wood shavings from our neighbour who was the local cabinet maker. When we had a thick paste, we formed them into tennis ball-sized globs and dried them in the sun. My little brother Fred joined in the fun and one day fell into the black concoction and got covered from head to toe. Mum didn’t see anything funny about it and got splattered herself when she came to rescue him. Fred thought it was all good fun but from then on, he was banned from briquette making. We couldn’t spare the soap to clean him up. Then later, once the bombing really started and houses were reduced to ruins, we would go into town and search for broken beams and anything else made of wood. I had to pull the four-wheeled cart. Brother Len said he was carrying the responsibility in case we got caught, but it sure seemed like I was doing most of the work.

Coal could only be bought on a coal permit - if it was available at all. The local coal merchant and the food-processing plant were the only businesses in our area that had trucks. The coal merchant had an old two-ton Ford truck with a four-wheel trailer he took to the mine to pick up his allowance. Some clever people found a way of getting coal at the rail freight depot. At night the coal cars were shifted around and assembled into freight loads to be sent to other destinations, and because of the blackout, the yard was pitch dark. A few Railway Policemen patrolled the area and Hitler Youth boys were assigned to keep the points from freezing in cold weather by putting metal trays with glowing coals under them. These boys easily managed to get a load of briquettes into a bag, which they then took home. Furnace coal was also stolen by opening a slide on the freight car hauling it. Twenty-five tons of coal would pour out and dozens of kids with sacks crawled like dirty ants over the heap of coal scooping the stuff up. Before the Railway Police could get to the place, the culprits would vanish into the night. During night air raids, when even the police would seek shelter, the kids came out in force and took all they could carry. When the ‘all clear’ sounded, they were already gone and the Reich was missing a few tons of coal. It got so bad that the signalman was issued a special pair of night vision binoculars to spot the little thieves. In the daylight, everyone stayed away, not so much because they were afraid of getting caught, but because signal boxes were a favourite target for the Jabos. A plume of smoke from an engine anywhere on the tracks attracted them like ants to sugar. The freight yard was about four miles away and too far for us to participate in the coal theft and there was always the danger of running into a warden on our way home who would demand to know the contents of the sack. Four miles isn’t that far in the daylight, but at night in pitch dark, it was a very long way.