After the Reich (72 page)

Frat

As already noted, there was to be no talking to the conquered Germans. ‘Fraternising’ was prohibited before the Western Allies arrived in Germany. The ban was first imposed after the First World War, but then the occupation of Germany had been limited to certain western districts. After the Second World War in some places it remained in force until October 1945, although it was perfectly ineffective.
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Soldiers were told not to be moved by the hunger of a ‘yellow-haired German child . . . there lurked the Nazi’. In the American army paper
Stars and Stripes
servicemen were rehearsed in useful slogans: ‘Soldiers wise don’t fraternise.’ A picture showed a comely German girl: ‘Don’t play Samson to her Delilah - She’d like to cut your hair off - at the neck.’ Or quite simply: ‘In heart, body and spirit every German is a Hitler!’
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The British were almost as heartless. The order banning frat was introduced to British forces in March 1945. In his proclamation to the Germans Bernard Montgomery asked them to tell their children ‘why it is the British soldier does not smile’. Very soon, however, Montgomery saw that the ban was unworkable with the children and exempted those under eight. On 12 June soldiers could address any child. The British scrapped the ban altogether in September, but until the following month Germans had to get out of the way of British soldiers on the pavement.
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In some quarters, the ban on frat was the source of acute frustration among Germans. Ursula von Kardorff heard about the prohibition on 11 June. Soldiers began to shout at the women: ‘We would like to talk to you, but we are not allowed. Eisenhower said so.’ Arthur Radley, a British officer serving in Austria, thought the whole thing ludicrous, but the ban had one unexpected advantage. His regiment had an RSM whom everyone disliked, but they could find no way of getting rid of him. Then, as they were marching into Styria, a girl asked him the time, and he replied. He was put before a court martial and broken to private. He was then transferred to another regiment. ‘A lot of people could breathe again.’
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On 29 June Clay reported that the ban was ‘extremely unpopular’. It was chiefly a ‘boy-girl problem’. ‘The only fraternisation that really interests the soldiers is going with the pretty German girl, who is very much in evidence.’ He thought the whole thing made for bad propaganda: it should be the American soldier, not the German girl, who wins hearts and minds.
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It was also wholly ineffectual: within a month of the Western Allies’ arrival a German lover became the rule. What the soldiers did when they were alone was fratting. For George Clare, coining a mixed metaphor rather a long time after the event, British soldiers were ‘cementing Anglo-German relations at the grass-roots’. His mess, a large, requisitioned Berlin flat, was ‘liberty hall’: you never went into any bedroom without knocking first. There was a chance there would be a ‘Veronika’ in there. Others went home to the family. One of Clare’s friends shared a bedroom with a woman and her mother. The latter just turned over and went to sleep.
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Neither Allied soldiers nor German women were ready to co-operate with the ban. Part of the problem was a shortage of the opposite sex. Most German men aged between sixteen and sixty were absent; those who remained were often invalids or cripples. Women aged between twenty and forty outnumbered their men by 160 to 100. Margret Boveri reported four women mobbing a twenty-year-old German youth in Neukölln in Berlin, and recalled the problems that had been caused for her generation by the loss of two million young men in the Great War. The conquerors, by contrast to the old men around, looked healthy and proud, which acted as an aphrodisiac of sorts. For the women themselves, their virtue had been compromised by two things - the experience of rape, often aggravated by violence, disease or pregnancy, and starvation. Clare’s frat, ‘Anita’, was lucky to have been raped just once: she had tried to wriggle out of it by pointing to her groin and saying ‘I sick!’ The Russian was wise to that. ‘I rubber!’ he replied.
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Very soon Clare learned that most if not all of his comrades in arms had adopted ‘Fräuleins’ and that certain nights when the men did not return to their billets were called ‘Fräulein nights’.
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The way to the Berlin women’s hearts appears to have been through their stomachs. From the Winston Club, British Other Ranks filled their haversacks with spam and cheese rolls, buns and cakes. A haversack filled with NAAFI food had the purchasing power of two cigarettes. You could feed a Fräulein and her family for four Gold Flakes or Players. British soldiers were rationed to 200 cigarettes a week, which made them the lords of the land with full seigniorial rights.
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Morality was loose and prostitution rife. Both the Allies and the German authorities turned a blind eye to it. In Nuremberg one of James Stern’s colleagues interviewed a prostitute. She said most of her customers were sad German soldiers looking for companionship, but there were American soldiers too, ‘both white and coloured’. The AMG had not sought to interfere, but the prostitutes had to register and see a doctor once a week.
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It was generally not a formal business arrangement in that way. German women were prepared to have sex with Americans for reasons that stretched from companionship to the need for protection, cigarettes, food or stockings. There was a wood in Nuremberg that Stern called ‘Conception Copse’. Between 6 p.m. and the curfew it was littered with GIs and German girls. As frat was still officially banned, they had to beware of MPs. There were, however, plenty of DPs acting as auxiliaries to the American forces who had no fear of the police - Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, Letts or Poles - and they too availed themselves of the German girls.
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13

Black Market

Old Reichsmark coins, which weren’t valid any more because of their silver content - we weren’t supposed to have them any more - and Party badges - all badges from Hitler’s time, Hitler Youth badges - with those we went to the [American] barracks and in the barracks we got cigarettes. And the cigarettes we exchanged for food at the farmers.

Quoted in Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans, New Haven and London 2003, 90

Cigarettes and CARE Packets

W
ith a cigarette worth more than a hundred-mark note even the old nobles were happy to make a little money smuggling cigarettes across the green frontier. An American cigarette was worth a suburban railway ticket, and a packet counted as a major bribe. In October 1945, one cigarette was worth four ounces of bread. In a POW camp they could cost as much as 120 marks a piece.
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The Germans who were best off were those who could still lay their hands on jewellery, watches or cameras. Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein remembered selling a badly damaged piece of Meissen porcelain to a black-marketeer for a considerable number of cigarettes. The piece was restored and sold to an American general’s wife who kept it too close to the fire and the restored part promptly fell off.
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The importance of the cigarette trade is revealed in contemporary literature. Heinrich Böll’s ‘Kumpel mit den langen Haar’ (My Long-Haired Mate) describes a raid on a black market. The central character sees jeeps drive up to a station filled with redcaps who then cordon off the area and begin their search. ‘It went incredibly quickly. I stood just outside the cordon and lit a cigarette. Everything happened so quietly. Lots of cigarettes landed on the ground. Pity . . . I thought and I made an involuntary calculation as to how much money was now lying in the dirt. The Black Maria quickly filled up with its quarry . . .’ The man wisely avoids going to his digs. He goes into the station and walks to the buffet where he hands over 200 cigarettes to Fritz the waiter and sticks the money into his back pocket. ‘Now I was completely without wares, just a packet for myself.’ He orders a bowl of meat stock and a piece of bread. He is joined by little Mausbach, quite out of breath. “You,” he stammered. “You need to beat it . . . they have searched your room and found the coke . . . Christ!” He was almost choking. I patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and gave him twenty marks . . . Pity, I thought again . . . eight thousand marks gone up in smoke . . . You are safe nowhere.’
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One way of surviving was smuggling from the Russian Zone to the West. Libussa von Krockow traded American cigarettes in the Russian Zone and procured nylons in Chemnitz that she then bartered with a shoemaker in Holstein for a pair of shoes. She suspended the smuggling in 1946, with the onset of the killing winter.
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In the spring of 1947 Clay made a move to stop the use of cigarettes as currency by banning their importation. He considered bringing in tobacco instead, thereby leading to a fall in prices as supply increased. Clay had to admit it was unlikely to remove the value of Lucky Strikes, as there had been a black market for American cigarettes before the war.
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Rumours of currency reform were rife six months before the Allies made their move. Until that happened barter was still the means by which people normally lived. A woman wanting to have her hair washed, for example, had to bring with her the soap, a towel and five pieces of wood. Wood was an important commodity, especially in winter, and Ruth Friedrich was appalled to see that her lover’s grave had been plundered of the pine fronds she had laid on it - an ancient and probably heathen Prussian tradition.
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For the Allies working in Germany shopping was done in ‘Occupation Marks’ - ‘a currency with an appearance even more spurious than that of the million- and milliard-mark bills of the inflation period after the First War’.
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Cigarettes were one means the Allies had of getting their way in Germany; another was chewing gum. A generation of Germans became addicted to gum as a result of GIs handing it out to children, so much so that even now chewing gum is nowhere in Europe so respectable as it is in Germany. Even the Old Etonian Stern was not averse to using gum as a way to the hearts of children.
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Another important commodity was soap. Prisoners released from American camps hoarded soap, which they could sell for food or cigarettes. Former POWs from British camps had no such currency. A bar of soap had a monetary value of between fifty and eighty marks. The most highly prized was Palmolive.

In the winter of 1946-7, as many as 60,000 chiefly elderly Germans died of cold and hunger. CRALOG (Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany) was a manifestation of the Allies’ change of attitude to the Germans. By the beginning of 1947 it had distributed 30,000 tons of food. In April 1946 CARE (Co-operative of American Remittances to Europe) joined in. This was the beginning of the famous CARE packets: 1.9 million of them were handed out in 1946 alone. After the winter Clay called for relief from Washington. He expressed the view that there was no hope of introducing democracy to a starving population.
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In a Germany where there were ‘calories but no food’
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something always needed to be found to supplement the scanty commons provided by the Allies - and that meant the black market. ‘Whoever wanted to live needed to find connections to the black market as a seller or a buyer.’
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There was nothing new about black markets, which will emerge wherever there is rationing. The black market flourished during the Third Reich despite some draconian punishments, from the Junker who was made an example of and given four months for failing to deliver his milk to the co-operative, to the 5,142 black-marketeers who were executed for illicit trading.
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The black market was often based in the main railway station. In a remarkable number of instances, it was the only largely undamaged structure in the city centre. The atmosphere in these stations appears in Böll’s early stories. Another man with an eye for detail was Zuckmayer - although with an important proviso. Zuckmayer points out that recording the man in the street often gives a false idea of how a country thinks because the stupidest have the loudest mouths, and more intelligent people either reflect more before they speak or hold their tongues.
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The station was the point of arrival and departure and a transit point: ‘In Germany there is . . . a ceaseless creeping, crawling and groping; an enraged ant-heap, the constant buzzing of swarms of wild bees; an eternal coming and going, tramping, running and criss-crossing; a scraping and creaking of millions of unquiet soles. This is the spirit of the “Black Market” or the “Green Border” [the unpatrolled frontier]; the world and the march of the homeless, the expellees, the masses torn asunder, the furtive traveller, the marauding youth.’

Railway stations were the centres of their universe, open all day and all night. ‘Stations are not just miserable waiting rooms for overtired, exhausted travellers; they are homes for the homeless.’
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On the north side of Frankfurt Station there was a hut operated by the Red Cross that served as a room for travelling mothers, where they could change their infants and receive a little nourishment in the form of porridge, gruel, skimmed milk or hot soup. There was no need of coupons. Despairing mothers often left their children in the hut, knowing that the Red Cross could hardly toss them out into the cold. On the far side of the Rhine, in the French Zone, there was rumoured to be a market for babies.
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