Spring 1941 brought relief from the cold and a bit of amusement in the form of one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the Third Reich. Berliners learned in mid-May that Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s personal deputy, had solo-piloted a Messer-schmitt to Scotland in a quixotic bid for peace with Britain. Hitler was so horrified that he never allowed Hess’s name to be mentioned in his presence again. Göring surmised that Hess was crazy, and this was the thrust of the official communique read over Greater German Radio on May 12. “Party Comrade Hess,” said the bulletin, had “fallen prey to delusions.” In Berlin, where the dour and fanatical Bavarian had never been popular, a new joke made the rounds: “The Thousand Year Reich has now become the One Hundred Year Reich; a zero has just been subtracted.”
The efforts of Hess notwithstanding, Britain remained firmly committed to the war, and a month or so after his flight Germany added another potent enemy, the Soviet Union. Of course it had always been merely a matter of time until Hitler exchanged his handshake with the Soviets for a grab to the throat, but the moment of truth came sooner than even he expected. Having given up attempting to invade Britain, Hitler decided that the best way to knock that nation out of the war was to conquer Russia’s vast natural resources, which would make the Reich invulnerable to the British blockade.
As far as Berlin was concerned, the opening of a new front in Russia on June 22, 1941, constituted what Howard K. Smith called “The Great Watershed.” If the conditions of daily life had started to become more difficult before Operation Bar-barossa, they deteriorated rapidly as the Russian campaign sucked resources out of the Reich. With the drain on livestock supplies, meat rations had to be cut, first to 500 grams per person per week, then to 450. Reductions after that were not officially announced, but were effected by providing butchers and restaurants with less meat. The number of meatless days at restaurants became two, then three. On these days the finer establishments substituted a red-colored paste called Lacks Galantine, which tasted like “soggy sawdust” to Smith, who estimated that after five months of the war in Russia Germans had given up four-fifths of their weekly meet ration. Trying to keep up appearances, the Kaiserhof Hotel continued to put two meat dishes on the menu, but never served more than one. Fats were also at a premium, as evidenced by the appearance of a. faux fat product made by filtering edible garbage and adding artificial flavoring. Even potatoes became difficult to find in the winter of 1941/42 due to a bad crop and demands from the army. Berliners were advised not to peel potatoes before boiling them, as this supposedly wasted 15 percent of each potato. Perhaps worse, the beer supply now became so tight that only the big hotels and foreign press club served it on a regular basis. The Adlon Hotel began watering its beer to make supplies last longer. Hard liquor being equally scarce, bars resorted to serving Himbeergeist, a raspberry liqueur, or a fake vodka that took the roof off one’s mouth. In 1941 wine shops across the city were closed and their contents bought by the government at a fixed price. When Smith left Berlin a month later, he could find no alcohol at all in the German capital. “Against its will, Germany had become, perhaps, the most temperate nation on earth.”
Housing had long been tight in Berlin, and it became considerably more so because of an influx of war bureaucrats and workers to man the arms factories. While the population increased by an estimated 25 percent, housing construction remained flat. Thus the legions of newcomers found it extremely difficult to find a single room, much less an apartment, in the overcrowded metropolis. Tex Fischer, an Associated Press correspondent, was forced to live in his office. Even the Crown Prince of Sweden, who showed up unannounced for a visit, was turned away by four big hotels before a fifth one found space for him. Of course, the problem would only become worse later in the war, as Allied bombs blew away more and more residences, and measures like expelling the Jews failed to provide sufficient Lebensraum for bombed-out Aryans.
Even before the bombing raids became more effective, Berlin’s vaunted public transportation system began falling apart due to lack of spare parts and qualified repair personnel. One bus and tram line after another went out of service. The number of taxis was cut by four-fifths, and those that remained received less than a gallon of fuel a day.
Taxi drivers and repair men could charge whatever they wanted, but many preferred to be paid in goods rather than in cash, since there was a dearth of items in the stores to spend money on. Even the KaDeWe department store, Berlin’s premier consumer paradise, now offered little to tempt the buyer. After searching the store for two hours for something of use, a Berliner complained: “That big barn is empty. It is a feat of skill to get rid of fifty pfennigs on all seven floors.”
Given these developments, it is not surprising that some of the foreign correspondents in the German capital began to wonder about the Berliners’ staying power. Speculation in the foreign press that Berlin might not be able to hold up under sustained bombing infuriated Goebbels, since he shared that fear himself. He countered such talk with accounts of Berliner pluck, citing the case of “one simple man who, after working all night during an air raid, upon going home in the morning, found his home destroyed, his wife and five children dead. Not a word of complaint was forthcoming.” This of course left open the possibility that the man in question was too stupefied with grief to complain.
Pity or Regret Is Completely Out of Place Here
In the summer of 1940 there were still about 70,000 Jews in Berlin. Many of them were too old or poor to leave; others continued to hope that they could outlast the evil that had descended upon them. To Goebbels this was a provocation. As long as Jews lived in Berlin, he complained, the city’s atmosphere would be polluted. He 332 proposed that they be removed to Poland within a period of eight weeks. He also insisted that Berlin, as the capital, should get preference in the expulsion over other “Jew cities” like Breslau.
To illustrate the perniciousness of the Jewish influence, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry sponsored the production of a crudely anti-Semitic film, Jud Suss, which premiered in Berlin on September 24, 1940. The film’s central character, the Jew Oppenheimer, is a parody of dark menace, greed, deceit, and lust; and by raping a blond virgin he adds Rassenschande (race defilement) to his many sins. Goebbels, who attended the premier, called it “a brilliant piece of work, an anti-Semitic film as we would wish it.” He was pleased that the audience “raved” with enthusiasm.