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

Chapter 8. Food (and Everything Else) Was Where You Found It

Well-meaning government officials of the Third Reich food ministry (there were a few) intended to cart all the food in Russia back home for the Germans while the conquest of that vast storehouse continued. This did not happen - simply because there was not much left when the Russians retreated from the Ukraine. Some greedy officials were much more interested in filling returning trains with loot anyway. You can’t fry a painting or make a stew from a statue, so that sort of booty did us no good. Party officials were the last to suffer from a food shortage, if they ever did. When Dr. Robert Ley, the head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF - German Labour Front), was captured by the 101st Airborne near Zell am See in Bavaria, he had a whole railway car of hams standing in a siding, not to mention all the other things he had accumulated to enjoy a life of luxury after the war. He was a loyal National Socialist to the end and never accepted the charge of ‘War Criminal’. Maybe he wasn’t much of a war criminal compared to others, but he was a criminal nonetheless. He committed suicide while awaiting trial in Nürnberg and I doubt if many Germans shed a tear.

What then did the people live on you might ask? An old German proverb goes something like: ‘In der Not, frisst der Teufel Fliegen’ (‘When the Devil is really hungry, he will eat flies’). Germans didn’t eat flies, but when food was in critical short supply during the winter of 1944/45, and especially during the two winters after the war, substitutes were invented that would make a well-fed 21st-century person sick. There were many wild plants we were told were edible that we had never tried before, but we learned them well. One was known in Germany as Huflattich. Tussilago and Coltsfoot are other names for it. The rather large leaves were cut up and prepared like spinach. This herb was well known as a medicine too. It was dried then burned in a basin and the smoke inhaled for treating a cold or any breathing problems. It was also used for bandaging open cuts. We collected many bags of the leaves for the WHW. Because of the leaf’s whitish soft underside, the leaves were sometimes called ‘Wanderers Klopapier’ (‘hiker’s toilet paper’). There were also groundhogs (Murmeltier) in our part of Germany and I’m not really sure if we ever ate one, but we probably did. What I do remember was that groundhog fat was used as a treatment for rheumatism and today in Germany it is an accepted scientific fact that it works. I use it now but I have to get it from Germany. I have not found a source for it in the United States even though we certainly have plenty of groundhogs.

In the spring of 1944 Brother Len attended a Gemeinschafts Klassen, which was a class for boys and girls and the topic was mushrooms. They grew by the millions in forests and fields and Len said they were told the things were an excellent source of protein and that they needed to be harvested. But the point was - one had to know which ones were edible and which ones were poisonous. Coloured posters were unrolled in the classroom and the fungi were marked with green for edible, red for poisonous, and brown if the instructor didn’t know. There were a lot of them marked in brown. The next day Brother Len took off into the woods, a basket in hand, searching for mushrooms. About 6:00 p.m. he came back with a basket full of them. We stood in awe, gaping at his collection, but Mum had an eye for these things and went to work sorting them out. She learned all about mushrooms in the convent in Aachen where she lived when she was a girl. Len, it turns out, didn’t know quite everything about mushrooms. Mum threw out almost all of them. They were toadstools and could have killed us all. After this lesson, we mostly left that source of cheap food alone, but we did collect dandelion leaves for salads. Although they tend to have a bitter taste, if one uses the fresh green ones and adds plenty of onions and a bit of mayonnaise, they make a very good salad. One can make a salad from almost anything whether it grows in the garden or not.

What Brother Len was good at, however, was slaughtering rabbits; Dad taught him before he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Rabbits were bred for eating, not as pets. Len could slaughter seven of the crunchers in a day and dress them ready for the canning jars.

‘I’ll be a general one day,’ Len announced at dinner after a day of slaughtering.

‘Generals don’t kill rabbits,’ I answered.

‘No, I mean at the front,’ he tried to explain.

‘Look Len, you might not have noticed but generals are seldom at the front line, and neither do they do the fighting and killing. They leave that to the soldiers in the trenches.’

‘Okay, maybe when I am a general, I’ll suggest that all generals fight on the front line alongside their men. General Paulus and the other generals who were taken prisoner at Stalingrad were on the front line.’

‘Yes Len; in a bunker with six feet of earth and steel beams over their heads.’

Every year in the autumn, after the grain was taken in by the farmer, people would be allowed to walk over the stubble and pick up anything that was left. This was put in a pillowcase and when full, it was beaten with a stick - a sort of home-made threshing machine. Winnowing was done by the wind in the yard. The kernels were then collected and ground into flour using a hand-held coffee mill. We had three of them and no coffee beans to grind. In the evenings, we sat around the radio grinding away, with most of the chaff going into the resulting flour. It was a tedious job but it was better to have bad bread than no bread at all. When baked, the bread was hard as a rock when it cooled and had the texture of a sanding block. By the end of the war, our stomachs could digest about anything, but worse was to come.

It was a lot of work to make a three-pound loaf of bread twice a week. This was true wholegrain flour and I would not recommend it for sensitive stomachs, but we ate it regularly and never had to worry about getting enough fibre in our diet. Fresh yeast was usually available from the local baker, but we discovered that even with fresh yeast, some flour was totally unsuitable for baking bread. You can make bread from barley and late in the war, canned turnips and barley bread was about all the Wehrmacht had to live and fight on, but the stuff would never rise, no matter how much yeast was used. As long as it was warm, it was easy to cut and eat, even if digesting it was a challenge. After it got cold, it was hard as concrete and had to be chopped with a bayonet or an axe. Some people even used old barley loaves to patch holes in walls. Earlier, when times were better for the Wehrmacht, the bread was made from rye and it was called Kommissbrot and despite the name, it had nothing to do with Communists. It was very good bread and it would keep well without turning to stone.

From early times, the German Armed Forces were called Der Kommiss by the soldiers themselves because of how important this bread was. It was different from the well-known Schwarzbrot (black bread, not pumpernickel) made from rye and molasses, which is still made in Germany. Kommissbrot was sort of greyish-brown and soft in texture with a hard crust. It was baked in shallow pans and the finished loaves looked like eight-inch wide by two-inch thick bricks that could be a couple of feet long, usually stacked two together. It certainly was of better quality than the stuff civilians had to eat. We had a Kommissbrot bakery in our village and at times, the soldiers who operated the military part of the bakery would give us a loaf. The Wehrmacht had their own bakeries, usually far behind the front, and they often shared facilities with a privately-owned bakery. There were also mobile bakeries, but to supply a battalion or regiment of a thousand men with bread required enormous supplies to be brought along and that space was needed for arms and ammunition. By the time the US 102nd Infantry Division occupied our area, the Wehrmacht bakers had fled to the east, but they left a hoard of several thousand loaves and we made good use of them.

One of the favourite uses of Kommissbrot came from the Turnip Winter of 1917, during the Great War. The bread was hollowed out and stuffed with mashed turnips and the inner part of the bread was used to make bread soup. In the Second World War, we stuffed the inside of the bread with mashed potatoes, chives and onions. Then the bread was put into a baking pan in a hot oven for about twenty minutes. When done, it was stored in a cool place and later sliced and fried in whatever fat was handy. This can only be done with bread that has a hard crust and is soft inside, and rye bread was the most suitable. The inner part of the bread was used, just like in 1917, to make bread soup. We added a handful of raisins if we had them. Turnips were also used to make a vegetable stew and made into a sort of jam too. My mother made a simple turnip preserve to put on black bread. Three turnips were cut into small pieces and cooked until soft and then mashed. A half-pound of sugar and a spoonful of pectin were then stirred into it. I remember that it had to be eaten within a week or so. Sugar was rationed, but in the autumn every household was allotted four pounds for making fruit preserves. When Spam arrived after the war, it was diced and added to the mashed potatoes we baked inside the Kommissbrot. After the loaf cooled and was sliced, we dipped the slices in a beaten egg, and then in breadcrumbs and fried them in a pan. This was like manna from Heaven for us.

Graupen (barley) grows in abundance in Europe, but it was not often eaten before the war. It was mainly used with malt to brew beer. Beer was a washout during the war because barley flour was used to make bread or sold as whole grain to use in soups and stews. Beer was last on the list for barley use. Graupen soup was on the menu at least twice a week. Some genius in the food supply chain had the idea of changing the name of Graupen soup to ‘Rum Fordsche Soup’. This was purely psychological; it was still barley and had nothing to do with rum at all. I have not seen whole barley grain offered in any shop since 1947. Maybe it can be found in health food shops; I don’t know. Barley grain needed a very long cooking time and we noticed a lot of chaff in the soup it made, but nobody cared. If it was sold in shops, we thought it must be okay to eat, so we ate it.

* * *

The high-altitude bomber streams going toward the east didn’t bother any of us. Then, in August 1944, everything changed. The Allies finally got the better of the stubborn German Army in northern France and broke out into the central plains. Advanced airfields were captured and that brought fighter-bombers within easy reach of our area in western Germany, only a stone’s-throw from the border with Holland and Belgium. Then they could hunt anywhere between Paris and the Rhine River for something worthwhile to shoot up. Trains, trucks, farmers in their fields and even single persons out walking weren’t spared. Worse than that were the twin-engined Havocs and A-20s that dropped fire cards over the ripening fields. The cards were about six inches square with a greenish-yellow spot in the centre that was covered in some kind of wax. The spot was phosphorous and when the wax melted in the sunshine, it burst into flames. Whole grain fields went up in smoke in 1944 and so did our hopes for something to eat in the coming year. Picking them up was dangerous too. After a few burned Hitler Youth fingers, the order came out saying we were not to take the cards to a collection point but deposit them by the side of the road where they could burn safely. There was also the added danger of getting hunted by the Jabos after the cards were dropped. The pilots knew that we would be out to collect the cards before they could ignite and made sure that our task would not be easy. Haystacks were not recommended as shelters because one tracer bullet could set the stack on fire. We played hide and seek with the Jabos, sometimes with dire consequences.

People have eaten horsemeat for centuries and in some countries they still kill horses and dogs for human consumption, but eating a horse, cat or dog that might have been lying dead out in the summer sun for several days is a different matter. From mid-1944, however, it was done by many bombed-out people because there was no other way to survive. You might say today you would rather die than eat your pet, but, those who did eat them back then survived, those who didn’t, died. We didn’t have many vegetarians during the war. You ate whatever was available whether it came from critters or cauliflowers. We all knew Hitler was a vegetarian but he could afford to be, with all the vegetables he could get that we couldn’t. Hitler didn’t raise rabbits and his greenhouse on the Obersalzberg was only for flowers, not vegetables. The NSV would tell you that you could eat almost anything, short of grass and cobblestones. Whether they tried some of their own recipes, I don’t know, but I personally never saw a skinny NSV official. The NSV also acted at times like the Red Cross, giving out cigarettes, beer and meals to soldiers at railway stations.

When milk was available, barley was boiled in half milk and half water. If the soup was too watery, cornflour was added. POWs had to exist on a diet like this, but by mid-1944 we didn’t live on much better, but unlike those poor souls in the Stalags, we at least had ration cards. Whether the items listed on the cards were available was another matter; most of the time they were not. Complaining got you nowhere; besides, public complaining was verboten. My dad did a short spell as a guard in a small POW camp that housed seventy-five Russian and Polish inmates who worked on local farms in our area. The farmer employing these prisoners at harvest time was also responsible for feeding them. They worked in the fields supervised only by the unarmed farmer or his deputy. Any POW had the chance to escape, but not one tried. Rumour had it that Stalin had ordered any ex-POW to be shot if he managed to get back to the Russian lines. This was maybe the reason that no POW ever attempted an escape, or maybe it was because the nearest Russian front in mid-1944 was still 700 miles to the east of us. With US and British POWs this was another matter. Belgium and France were only a few miles to the west but the Germans, with foresight, put the Western Allied POWs in Stalags far to the east, in Pomerania, Silesia and Mecklenburg. Some of the camps were as far east as Danzig. Several POWs tried to escape and were caught, some made it to the borders, and the resistance groups were only too pleased to help these guys back to the Allied lines.

One former POW named Bob that I met years after the end of the war was taken prisoner at the Salerno landings in 1943. He and a group of forty-four others were put into a Stalag near the concentration camp at Stutthof (now in Poland). They had no contact with those held in the concentration camp and worked mostly on farms, digging potatoes, beets, and turnips. When the Russian front advanced westward, the prisoners were marched on foot to Pomerania and Schwerin by Wehrmacht soldiers who were in a hurry. Thirty-eight of them made the trip and lived to be liberated. Bob said that sauerkraut, potatoes and hard black bread were their staple foods. By 1945 we didn’t live any better. Long after the war, I met a few people who had survived life in concentration camps. Those people knew what hunger really was, along with a constant fear of death - and not from bombs falling on their heads either.

Millions of ordinary people died of hunger during the Third Reich, but concentration-camp inmates were even worse off than we were. I doubt that even a sparrow could be found alive in those camps. The Wehrmacht also went hungry at times, especially in Russia, and they had to fight an enemy that was hell-bent on winning a war. The front-line soldiers learned to live and cook like Ivan. Soon they were making Russian Borscht, Kapustra and even fish soup. Borscht was something of a staple diet for both sides at the front. My father survived the first terrible winter in Russia on the northern front. That’s where he learned to cook the stuff. During lulls in the fighting, they all searched gardens, which were under two feet of snow, for stalks of rotted frozen cabbage, shrivelled beets and whatever had been grown by the former owners. Once, they found a dead horse, frozen solid by temperatures that reached -40°C, and using axes and hand grenades, they managed to break lose a few pounds of frozen meat. All this was then boiled in an old rusty dye cauldron they found inside the fur-processing plant they had occupied. Salt used in the dying process was used to add a little flavour to the stew. The smoke from the cooking fire gave Ivan an aim point for 7.62cm short-range guns they called Ratsch-Bums, but who cared. They would rather have died with a full stomach than live hungry and become a prisoner anyway. Luckily, it never came to that; Cholm was finally relieved in the spring of 1942 and Dad’s unit was relieved and shipped back to Germany for recuperation. Thanks to Ivan, Borscht became standard fare in Germany in the two winters after the war.

Unlike modern cooking that is expected to be finished in thirty minutes, stews and Borscht need several hours to cook. No one today has the time or the patience to wait hours for a meal. Fat from pork or beef is especially frowned-upon in today’s kitchen, but we made Schmalz out of it. This was invented during the First World War by desperate German housewives and it still sold today in butchers’ shops, but it is made with better ingredients. Many former Allied POWs who were held in German Stalags for long periods of time have asked me what Schmalz really was. It was served to them almost daily. It was simply raw animal fat from skin and bones, and it could be from any animal, including horses. The skin and bones were slowly boiled in water to remove every bit of fat until almost all the water was boiled away. This was then put through a meat grinder, bones and all. It was then boiled again with milk or water for about thirty minutes until most of the water or milk had evaporated. Salt, pepper and parsley (or whatever else was available) was then added. It was allowed to cool and spread over bread or used later for frying something else for a little flavour. It can be kept for a day or two without refrigeration and for much longer if kept cool. We sometimes made pancakes with it but mostly it was used for frying potatoes. Cooking oil was unheard of, so we used what we had.

One clear day in late winter 1944, two fighter-bombers came in low from the west and targeted a turnip bunker in a farmer’s field not far from our house. Two 500lb bombs opened up that bunker and scattered turnips everywhere. For good measure, they also fired two rockets into a haystack and set it on fire. Melting snow soon put out the fire so no real harm was done. Not to be caught by the farmer stealing his turnips, we waited until dark and then Len and I set off, each with a small hemp sack. Apparently others had witnessed the brutal attack on the defenceless turnip bunker and had the same idea. We all filled our sacks and went home with the pilfered vegetables. We didn’t bother telling Mum where our harvest had come from and she didn’t ask. I took a few of the turnips up to the quads’ cook the next day and everyone there thanked me for the change in rations. Even turnips are a welcomed improvement over sauerkraut soup. The following day however the men were not so appreciative.

‘What’s the matter with you guys, didn’t you enjoy the present I brought to you yesterday’? I asked.

‘Well, half the turnips were good and we made soup from them, but the other half had worms in them, so you can have them back for rabbit feed,’ Gunny replied.

‘Well, I’ll be more careful the next time I steal turnips for you while being shot at. You’re an ungrateful bunch and by the way, I don’t remember hearing any firing from the quads while those planes were bombing the turnip bunker.’

‘We never heard a thing,’ Gunny shot back. ‘There was no alert and no planes came our way.’

They were never short of excuses. Later we would all eat turnips, raw or cooked, worms or no worms.

Fish soup might not be to the taste of the ordinary 21st-century person but it was at least a change for us during and after the war. There were many lakes around us, and of course the Rhine wasn’t far away. We fished in the lakes and rivers before the war, but for some reason this was forbidden after the war came. Of course that didn’t keep us from poaching when we could. It was hard for the game wardens to watch for fishing lines tied to a tree and put out in streams or ponds. What we used for fish soup were the heads and the fish bones, usually the stuff that’s thrown away these days. The fish flesh would have already been eaten with potatoes the day before. The fish heads and bones were put into boiling water with chopped onions and leeks and cooked for an hour. The fish pieces were then removed and fed to whatever would eat them; chickens will eat most anything. The soup was then brought back to the boil and two ounces of flour or cornflour dissolved in a cup of milk was added. We added some grated cheese, chives and parsley if it was available and let the soup come back to a boil. If we had to use salted fish, we didn’t add salt but with fresh fish, it was a good idea. Our fish soup wasn’t really good but it was a hundred times better than sauerkraut soup. I guess if we had made it from better parts of the fish, it would have tasted better.

We also made beer soup. Making soup from the beer that was available near the end of the war was a lot better than drinking it. During the war, beer was a weak watery concoction due to a lack of ingredients. The schnapps distilleries were doing good business however, because our soldiers in Russia especially couldn’t get along without it. They said it warmed them up if no hot food was available and that at least it wouldn’t freeze even at those temperatures. Pubs and public drinking establishments were well visited during the war; mostly by older First World War veterans. As beer was sold without ration coupons, some wise know-it-all published a recipe through the NSV on how to make a nourishing soup with it and my family received one of the leaflets. At times, the NSV gave out bulletins with new recipes and we tried some of the more sensible suggestions. We didn’t have beer soup very often though, because it required an egg and late in the war, one egg was a week’s ration for one person.

An interesting food invention from the First World War was called Pannas, similar to American Scrapple, and it’s still made and sold today, but with better and healthier ingredients. My mother learned to make it when she was younger and she began making it again beginning in 1942. The ingredients soon became hard to get for individuals, so butchers started making and selling it. Friday and Saturday mornings were usually reserved for meat rations and Thursday became Pannas day. Butchers had huge cooking vats and in it went all the bones that couldn’t be sold for making soup. Small cuts of fat, liver, sausage and leftover meat scraps of all kinds were added to the pot. No one ever asked what was in it. This was boiled for several hours to extract the last atom of flavour from the bones. They were then removed and coarse-ground rye, barley, flour or whatever was available, along with salt and pepper, was added. All this was boiled again for several hours until it was thick and then poured into bread loaf tins. It took twenty-four hours for the stuff to set, and then it was sold to customers without requiring ration cards. Each person got a half-kilogram slice. Everyone was registered with a particular butcher so you couldn’t just go from one to the next and get a slice from each; we tried that. By 1944 many butchers had developed this recipe into an art and eventually buckwheat, mouldy flour and other leftovers from meat processing went into it. Although this stuff had been cooked at the butcher’s shop, Mum had to fry it in order to make it halfway edible. One day, in the spring of 1944, on a Pannas Thursday, a bunch of Marauder planes and a half-dozen P-38s decided to drop a few bombs into the centre of town. One 250lb bomb hit the butcher’s shop on Long Street and wrecked the front of the building. Amazingly, no one was hurt and the Pannas pot continued to bubble away, now with a generous dose of ceiling plaster added. This didn’t stop the butcher from selling his batch to eager takers, but he did sell it a little cheaper than usual.

Getting a pound of pork or beef bones was a special bonus for us. If the butcher was a good friend, a few cigarettes or a pound of sugar could do wonders when it came to things like that. Soup bones were usually bones from beef, already stripped of the last milligram of meat by the butcher. These were sold by the kilogram as Suppen Knochen and were boiled by the housewife for an hour, and then a few herbs and noodles were added. When times were really bad, the bones were cooked the next day and even the day after that. By then the soup was just warm water with a few noodles and herbs. Today bones are for the dog but a properly-made soup using them is still one of my favourites. First, it is important to use the right amount of water for boiling the bones; adding cold water while the soup is cooking is not recommended. The boiling time varies, but about two hours at medium heat per pound of bones is a good starting point. Cut-up leeks and fresh parsley can be added about thirty minutes before the soup is done. Fresh parsley has a tendency to turn from green to grey if cooked too long. If you use dried parsley, it has turned grey already during the drying process and will not turn green again. The taste is about the same, but a bit of green in the soup adds to the appearance, and we eat with our eyes as well as our mouths. If you prefer a somewhat darker soup, a cut-up roasted onion can be added. This will give the soup a light brown colour and a nice flavour. Add a whole stick of cut-up celery about halfway through the boiling and salt to taste. Liquid Maggie seasoning does wonders for any soup and you can add that anytime. Meat in Germany has always been sold as Braten (roasting) or Suppe (soup) meat. Soup meat might be pork or beef that has been shaved from bones or it might be kidneys or other less appealing cuts. Kidneys are always from calves but there might be pork in the package as well, but late in the war and just after, we didn’t ask what it was.

* * *

Farmers had it better in the bad times, despite being controlled by the Reich Agriculture Commission, who had their men in every village to tell people what they could and could not grow. Farmers usually ignored the inspections because those doing the inspecting had no idea what they were doing and could usually be paid off with a slab of bacon or some fresh sausage. We were allowed to keep six chickens and twenty-six rabbits. Farmers kept geese, chickens, ducks and other meat-producing animals on their property in any quantity they could feed, providing the Party got their share occasionally. Farmers had the reputation of hoarding food during and after the war, but nobody dared search a farm for hidden items. After all, these were the people who supplied the nation with food. The ‘don’t piss off the cook’ rule applied to farmers just like it did to military cooks. In the spring we all helped the farmers in the area plant and thin rows of sugar beets, and as pay we got a good meal. One spring Aunt Maria was preparing a goose and I watched her make goose sausage. I wrote down the recipe for my mum but she was not very interested because goose was out of the question for us.

The goose was already plucked and gutted but the long neck and head was still in place. She chopped the head off using a cleaver and with the skill of a guillotine operator she chopped off the long neck just above the torso. With an expertise that astonished the rest of us, she pulled out all the inner parts of the neck, leaving just the fat neck tube. She then sewed one end of tube together and filled this neck tube with ground goose liver and kidneys, fresh parsley, onions, salt and other spices. Then she sewed the other end together making a sausage shaped tube about eighteen inches long by three inches in diameter. This she put into a large cauldron of boiling water for about thirty minutes. While this was boiling away, a huge round loaf of rye bread the size of a small cartwheel was fetched by the maid - yes, maid. Farmers really did have it better than the rest of us. Aunt Maria got a bread knife the size of a Brazilian machete, made a cross under the loaf, like all good Catholics did in those days, and began slicing off inch-thick pieces. I was afraid she would cut her arm off but she was an expert. A few divisions of women like Aunt Maria would have made a big difference at Stalingrad. A crock of real butter was produced and slices of bread were covered with the stuff. When the goose neck sausage was done, we gathered around the spotlessly scrubbed table and said our prayers. Each of us who had worked in the beet field was given a generous piece of that sausage, and believe me, it was good. Aunt Maria’s goose neck sausage recipe would be perfect at modern-day Christmas.

We had our own fruit trees and bushes that grew everything except peaches, which didn’t do well in that cool climate. However, one distant neighbour did have a peach tree that usually bore fruit in September, but they never ripened enough to eat. One night in mid-September 1944, Brother Len had the great idea that we should raid that garden and liberate some of the unripe fruit. The garden was about a half-mile outside our village. We took a sack with us and made sure nobody was watching from their blacked out windows. Far out to the west, the horizon was full of flickering lights. The battle of Nijmegen (Operation Market-Garden) was raging there. RAF bombers high up in the sky were heading eastward on their nightly bombing run and a few searchlights were trying their best to get one of the Lancasters into their beams. We climbed the peach tree and searched in the darkness for the peaches. Suddenly the entire sky lit up. A bomber had been hit by the 88s. In the light, we could see the owner of the garden coming toward us with a rake in his hand. It was time for a quick departure, but that Lancaster saved us from a certain thrashing. The burning plane jettisoned its bombs and they came whistling down; one exploded in a clover field 200 yards away and the rest hit the ground farther to the north. The plane crashed about four miles west of us. The owner of the garden ran for his air-raid shelter and we made our getaway with twenty-five hard green unripe peaches. If Mum was pleased to have us back with the fruit, I can’t remember, but I do recall the stomach pains we got from eating our stolen peaches.

Rationing bred black-market trading and those people who had stocked up on items before the war could trade what they saved for anything they needed. This was highly illegal and a Gestapo memo I found recently from 1942 forbade these transactions and threatened fines, prison or concentration camp for those caught. Many were caught by the police and the Gestapo, but the black market was never totally wiped out. A clever way to avoid getting caught was to place an ad in a newspaper advertising something like an accordion for sale. Then, when the two parties would meet, the accordion would be traded for a pound of coffee or whatever the person had. It was not verboten to sell an accordion of course, but it was illegal to trade it for something that had to be bought on ration coupons. Even broomsticks could only be obtained with a permit, and if you think you could just go out into the woods and cut your own, you would be risking your life. Brögger Flönz was surely somewhere around, and with his binoculars, he could be watching your every move.

Poaching was too dangerous and cutting down a tree, even if it was small enough to be a broomstick, could land you in a concentration camp. We poached anyway, but we never got caught, although once or twice we got away only by a cat’s whisker. We bred rabbits but at times we put up snares in well-known hare runs, especially in turnip fields. Hares can grow to four times the weight of a rabbit and would feed a family for a week. Göring appointed Reich Jägermeisters (hunting managers), who were sort of supervisory game wardens for specific areas, and they in turn appointed Forstmeisters (forest manager) who walked all day (sometimes at night too) around their designated area, which was usually ten square kilometres, carrying a shotgun with permission to shoot at any poacher who did not stop when challenged. Before the war Göring, as Reichsminister for Forest and Wildlife (among his many other titles) had hunted in the Reichswald after the Rhineland occupation in 1936. Hunting was strictly reserved for special permit-holders and still is. Even a fishing license was not easy to come by during the war. Göring’s laws against poaching, introduced in 1934-35 were severe. Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg were full of violators. Concentration camp names like these were unknown to us then. We were told the Konzentrationslagern were places for re-education. There were none anywhere near us, not even within a hundred miles, as we discovered after the war.

Pheasants were a specialty for us to catch, and Brother Len invented an ingenious trap. I think some other poacher must have told him how to do it. We would drop a handful of corn in a specific area where these wild birds gathered. It would be called ‘seeding the field’ today. Once the birds grew accustomed to the free meal, they would show up every morning on schedule. The trap wasn’t really a trap at all. We cut a foot square piece of brown packing paper and folded it diagonal and glued the diagonal sides together. That way we had a triangular paper bag. Then we opened the bag and put a small pebble inside so the wind wouldn’t blow it away. We then smeared a bit of sticky kraut molasses around the inside of the bag and put a few bits of corn in front of the bag and more inside. Most of the corn was put right at the small tip of the bag. The bird came and picked up the first few kernels of corn in front, then proceeded to pick up the corn inside the bag. Once the head or neck feathers came in contact with the sticky molasses, the bag stuck to the bird’s head. It would run in circles until we chased it down. They wouldn’t fly away if they couldn’t see where they were going.

Nobody had a shotgun as far as I know, except old Brögger Flönz. He treated anyone out in the fields with suspicion except the farmers. One day, early in the war, a big bomb dropped about a mile outside town in a field. No one was hurt and soon the huge crater filled up with ground water, so we went swimming in it - stark naked of course. Flönz caught us swimming once and came walking up, gun over his shoulder and asked us what we were doing. Brother Len, who always had answer for everything, said ‘Fishing’.

‘No fishing allowed here,’ he yelled, ‘you ought to know that. I’m going to report you to the school headmaster. Now get out and get dressed.’

It had not occurred to Flönz that the ‘fish pond’ was a bomb crater. People in positions like that were the real dummies of the system and of no use for anything. There were plenty of them around, right up to the end of hostilities.

I remember one Friday in the spring of 1944, I was told by Mum to go by tram to Krefeld and get some horsemeat. Rumours of unrationed food spread like wildfire and on that day I was armed with a shopping bag and eight Reichsmarks to get me to the city, buy the horsemeat (Trab Trab as we called it), and get home. Sounds simple, but nothing was simple in a country full of desperate people. The driver and conductor of the tram were not known to me, otherwise I could have gotten a free fifty-Pfennigs ride. I left home at 5:00 a.m. to be in the queue by 6:00 a.m. A lot of other people apparently had the same idea because the tram was full all the way to Krefeld. Since it was early morning, there was no danger from attacking fighter-bombers, and the RAF night shift was finished hours earlier. The end of the line was near the Krefeld water tower since the tracks had not been repaired from the last bombing and we had to walk the rest of the way.

There was already a line about a hundred feet long after our mile walk, but we all expected to get a share from the butcher. Some people said that six horses had been slaughtered the day before and a little arithmetic made me think that I had a good chance of getting some of the meat even if I was the hundredth person in line. It was still two hours before the shop would open and daylight was coming fast and with it, the chance of a fighter-bomber visit. By 7:30 a.m., there were several hundred hungry people in line. I feared the opening of the shop more than the fighter-bombers. I knew there would be a stampede to get into the place first. Hungry men and furious housewives can be more fearsome than a bullet-spitting Thunderbolt. Someone up there in Heaven must have been reading my thoughts; a flight of P-38s came to my rescue. Under normal circumstances a dreaded bunch of killers like this would have scattered everyone, but these were not normal circumstances, even for wartime. No alert had been sounded. Maybe no one had expected an early morning visit but nevertheless, here they came, stitching up the tarmac and cobblestone streets with their machine guns. The milling crowd forgot the horsemeat and scattered into alleyways and front yard ditches. I jumped to the front door of the shop, seeking shelter in the doorway. The P-38s came back around a few times but no one was hurt, even when a drop tank was released. It fell into a garden nearby. Before the people in the crowd recovered their wits, the shop door opened and I was the first one in. Then the stampede started but I got the meat, neatly wrapped in the daily Nazi newspaper, and left the place in a hurry.

When I got back to the tram station, I discovered that I had spent all the money on meat and the tram ride to Krefeld and had none left for the fare home. With no other transportation available, it looked like an eleven-mile walk home for me. I made three miles the first hour and got as far as the huge DEW Steel Works, a very dangerous place to hang around in a war. But rescue was at hand in the form of the tram. It had stopped at the DEW station and before it could get away, I jumped on the back bumper of the last car. Nobody on the tram, including the driver, could see me. People along the road could see me, but only after the tram had passed by. I hung on to the tram with one hand and the horsemeat with the other and made it home with my treasure.

* * *

Spring weeds were a welcome change of diet for us. We didn’t call them weeds (Unkraut) of course; they were still vegetables (Gemüse) to us. One has to know which weeds are okay to eat and when someone discovered that a particular plant was edible, the news spread like wildfire from home to home. I wondered how that first person figured out that something like stinging nettles was edible. That person must have really been starving. The roots can reach a foot or longer and can be cooked like any vegetable and eaten. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it for sale except as an herbal treatment for an enlarged prostate, but if you want to dig your own, this is how you can prepare it: Cut off all the green parts and the very bottom tip of the roots and discard. Wash the roots in warm water and make sure all dirt is removed. They can then be cooked whole like carrots or grated and put into soups. They can be cut into pieces after cooking and mixed with green lettuce, olive oil, sweet vinegar and a teaspoon of sugar to make a tasty cold salad. Some people add a finely-chopped onion to the salad but I never have been very fond of eating onions with sugar.

A few other weeds that we regularly ate were:

Yarrow (Achillea): The name was derived from the Greek hero Achilles who was supposed to have healed wounds he received in battle with this plant. This grows in almost any garden and the plants can be found in any garden centre. Normally it has white flower heads but variants are known in yellow and pink. We used the flowers for making tea, alone or with other wild plants. The plant itself is quite bitter.

Ground Ivy (Glechoma): This was used like yarrow but we ate the cooked leaves as well.

Masterwort (Angelica): This was picked when the plant was just putting on new leaves. The leaves were eaten as in a salad or cooked as a vegetable. Older plants are said to have medicinal uses as well. Flowers and seeds cannot be eaten.

Dandelion (Taraxacum): This is a good plant to eat cooked, like spinach or just raw, like lettuce. The flower stems are too bitter to eat but are not poisonous.

A winter food source for us that is mostly ignored today is Viper Grass, also known as Black Root or Scorzonera. We used this weed in salads by washing the roots first and then thinly slicing or grating them. Mixed with celery, pepper and salt, the combination is quite good. They can also be cooked but they will turn brown and not look like anything to eat. We found that if the roots are boiled first, then peeled, they are much better. We also mashed them and then fried them as a sort of pancake. Ginger roots were also used in salads but they were prized as the main ingredient in a home-brewed Schnapps called Ratzeputz which loosely translates to ‘rat cleaner’, ‘rat plaster’ or ‘rat poison’. That was a good name. It burnt like rat poison. A spoonful of ground red pepper was often added to each bottle to make it even more potent. Our soldiers in Russia loved it during the cold winter of 1941/42. On the fronts a saying was created that went something like: ‘My last word shall be “Ratzeputz”; after drinking it, I won’t mind being kaput.’

After the terribly cold winter of 1941/42 was over, our schoolteachers told us that to keep our soldiers from freezing in the next winter, a clothes drive by the WHW was being started. I found this rather disturbing; we had been told in 1941 that the war was almost won, so now it was 1942 and we were looking forward to the next winter already? My brother Len naturally knew more about this and he convinced me to listen. He knew a lot more about lots of things, or so he thought. His view was that since our Wehrmacht had to occupy a large slice of Russia even after we finished beating the ‘Ivans’ (the Russians), the soldiers would need warm clothes for the winter occupation. My remark that I had not seen a naked Russian in pictures from the Eastern Front, and that they surely had cloth mills and tailors enough in Russia to dress their 128 million inhabitants fell on deaf ears. In any case, I was surely not going to give the WHW any of my warm winter sweaters - so Len had a better idea. It was early spring and the farmers in our area were already busy sowing wheat, rye, barley, and oats. To protect the fields from hungry birds, the farmers put up scarecrows everywhere, complete with hats on top. We sneaked out into the fields about midnight one night, and high up we heard a lone British snooper plane we nicknamed ‘Iron Gustav’ on his normal rounds, taking night photos of our area for future bombing raids. We knew he had no bombs, so we proceeded with Len’s plan. We undressed a few of the scarecrows and stuffed the clothes in a hemp sack. Our teacher was delighted the next day and we were given time off from homework. We did that a few nights, but then a farmhand started patrolling the fields and that put a stop to our pilfering. Later in 1943, when fighter-bomber attacks increased, the scarecrows disappeared altogether. The pilots would fire at anything anywhere that looked remotely like a human being, even scarecrows.

To stop birds from invading the fields, we were told to take sparrow and starling nests out wherever we found them. They usually built under the eaves of houses. The reward was five Pfennigs (about two cents) for every dead baby bird we collected. That might sound terrible today, but in order to survive; we had to protect our food resources. A proclamation by the authorities said that each sparrow could consume two ounces of grain per day, and with millions of the creatures around, this amounted to several tons of wasted food that could be used to feed people. In 1946, we received no reward for killing sparrows; instead we plucked them like chickens and ate them ourselves. You soon come to realise that eating sparrows can keep you alive, that is, if you can kill enough of them, and without a gun of any kind, that’s not an easy thing to do.

* * *

It was a dangerous life for schoolchildren late in the war. There were no school buses; you walked to school even if it was three or four miles. You kept a constant eye on the sky and listened for the sound of engines. One plane 20,000 feet up doesn’t make much noise, but 500 bombers with four engines each can be heard for miles. Air-raid shelters in schools were not reinforced, and after D-day, when fighter-bombers swarmed over our area on any clear day, all schools were closed. The Party Bonzen had nothing better to say other than, after Germany’s final victory, lessons would be resumed, new schools would be built, and life would be much better. This was declared in an official Party proclamation sent to each school child’s family.

‘The only thing missing is an Iron Cross for us,’ I said to Brother Len after reading this worthless proclamation.

‘Medals are for soldiers at the front,’ he replied.

‘Is that so? We are at the front too; remember Goebbels telling us that we here on the home front are also doing our bit for victory’?

‘Yes,’ Len answered, ‘but the front is artillery, trenches, machine guns, and an enemy opposite you.’

‘We’ve got that here Len. We have trenches all around us. We don’t have any artillery yet, but 1,000-pound bombs surely do as much damage as 105mm shells and we get machine gun fire aplenty from the Jabos. Our front is not in front of us, it’s above us. By the way, the 88 crew needs a new loader, so why don’t you have a word with the captain and volunteer for the job, and while you’re at it, tell him that we’re not on the front and see what he has to say about it.’

‘I’m not a flak man; I can’t be stuck in a fixed position.’

‘Neither am I, big brother, but I do my share at the quads, and I would gladly help out at the 88s if the shells weren’t too heavy for me to lift.’

Our argument was eventually interrupted by sirens sounding an imminent air raid, but no planes showed up in our area. The quads stayed silent and the 88s didn’t bother with fighter-bombers anyway. We didn’t see any planes of any sort this time. Maybe it was a false alarm. By this time, there were no drills and we took every alarm to be the real thing. One day soon after that, the Jabos attacked an outlying farms and later Len was in the vicinity with a group of Hitler Youths building a plank bridge across an anti-tank ditch so the farmer could get his harvest into his barn. Several cows, grazing peacefully in the farmer’s field, had been the victims of an eager P-47 pilot and the normal procedure was to inform the local veterinarian who then decided what to do with dead and injured animals. The vet came after an hour, and brought along a police constable who had the authority to shoot and kill any injured livestock. After their inspection, a truck was then ordered to the field to take the dead animals to the Abdeckerei, or ‘Knackers Yard’. We had a better name for that establishment - the ‘Soap Factory’. The truck did not come until after dark. Trucks in open fields were easy targets for fighter-bombers. One calf had a severed head and somehow, before the truck came, Len managed to bring the bloody head home. I for one was not very pleased to see this thing on our table but Mum was in high spirits and out came her box of recipes. I couldn’t imagine the anatomy and cooking lesson we were all about to get.

It takes strong hands, an open mind and, above all, an empty stomach to extract the brain from a cow’s head. The brain was placed in a basin with cold water to soak the blood out, and then the veins were removed with a sharp knife. After that job was done, it was put into a saucepan and covered in water. A teaspoon of salt and two tablespoons of vinegar were added along with several herbs and spices. It was boiled for twenty minutes on a low heat and served at dinner with tomato salad and butter. The leftovers were fried the next day and eaten with bread - sort of a calf-brain sandwich. No one ever mentioned anything about finding a calf in the field with no head. There was not much that was thrown away in those days. Lungs were cooked in the same way as brains and used in a ragout; hearts and even udders were also turned into palatable dishes.

* * *

May in Germany is the month when Yellow Broom (Scotch Broom) is in full flower and it was used for making many medicines. Ten- to fourteen-year-old kids picked them and dandelion flowers by the sackfull. Mum had learned from her mother and grandmother about cures for almost anything. Tea was made from potato peelings that treated the most persistent stomach or kidney problems. Bandages were washed and used over and over again, but later in the war, they were half paper and just dissolved if you tried to wash them. My brother Len got a bad infection from stepping on a rusty nail and the doctor gave us a bag of salt of some sort to treat it. He soaked the foot for a couple of hours in the hot salty water and the swelling went down. He was up and around in a couple of days but not quite healthy enough to help with the chores of course.

Most of the home remedies we had are not found in America or I have not seen them. Common names for plants are different here, but I can recognise some of the ones we used. For a common cold, we would get a pair of long socks and soak them in a half-and-half solution of apple vinegar and water; then put the wet socks on, wrap warm towels over the socks, and just lie down for a couple of hours - it worked wonders. We had long socks up to just below our knees back then. Another cold remedy that worked required ingredients we couldn’t get easily later in the war: boil a mixture of water, milk and wine (3:3:1 ratio) add lemon juice and sugar and drink hot. A third cure was made of hot white schnapps (gin will do) mixed with a dash of pepper and black root or ginger powder.

One of the great remedies for coughs, colds and headaches was made from unpeeled boiled potatoes. Mash them up, wrap a few spoonfuls in a cloth and put it on your forehead or, for coughs, on your chest. I guarantee this recipe. Potato peelings were also dried in the oven and used as a remedy for head and shoulder joint ache. The hot peelings were put in a pillow case and slept on. For diarrhoea we boiled oak bark, then mixed the water from it with an equal part of wine and boiled the combination again for a few minutes and drank it hot. General stomach pains were relieved by chewing a lemon peel - if we had one. Indigestion was common with the things we had to eat but there was a cure for that and it came straight from the office of Dr. Leonardo Conti, the Reichsgesundheitsführer (Health Minister). It was two tablespoons of apple vinegar, one teaspoon of sugar, and a teaspoon of ‘Kaiser Natron’, which was a brand of baking soda. This was mixed with enough water to dissolve everything and drunk. We discovered that another great remedy for things like swollen joints and muscle pain is cottage cheese: smear cottage cheese over the affected area and wrap with a cloth. Leave it on several hours. For an earache we used onions cut up in strips and stuck in the ear.