Shortage of food was becoming a big issue in the cities. Owing to lack of transport, acute shortages—exacerbated by hoarding, especially by military personnel—had existed in Rhineland cities before the Allies arrived.69 ‘Hunger, terror from the air and the military situation’ determined the popular mood, according to a report from Stuttgart in late March. ‘A large section of the population is already completely at an end as regards bread, fats and foodstuffs.’70 There were serious worries about food supplies in Berlin, too, as rations were reduced again.71 Many claimed they already had nothing to eat—though ‘painted and powdered ladies wearing expensive furs and afternoon dresses’ were said still to frequent the few remaining restaurants.72 Anxieties were said to be mounting over likely future acute shortages. The Allies, it is true, had reported adequate supplies of food hidden away—some of it allegedly looted from the homes of neighbours who had evacuated—when they marched through the Rhineland.73 But even in the country, where farmers especially always seemed to have sufficient in store, the diminished rations were making themselves felt. ‘Just enough if you can sleep the whole day,’ bemoaned one worker in south Germany, where there was much ‘bad blood’ over shortages of potatoes and other foodstuffs.74 Many individuals tried to pretend that they had lost their ration cards as applications for substitute cards soared after the drop in rations was announced.75 Directives from Bormann—perhaps emanating from Hitler himself—instructing the Gauleiter to coordinate measures to make more use of wild vegetables, fruits, berries, mushrooms and herbs to mitigate food-ration reductions, and wild medicinal herbs to compensate for shortage of medicines, were unlikely to have been warmly welcomed.76
Cuts in electricity and gas supplies and severe coal shortages were commonplace in big cities. Drains were often blocked by bomb damage. Water could in some places be had only from standpipes in the street. People in some rural areas had to resort to cooking on stoves fired with peat.77 Schools and universities had mainly closed by now. Some schools were requisitioned as field hospitals for the wounded.78 Floods of refugees placed a massive additional burden on housing and other public services. Welfare work was made more difficult by the lack of unified control, resulting—typical for the Third Reich—in conflicting demands from different agencies.79 Hospitals could not cope with the high numbers of casualties from air raids. In early March, Bormann ordered the incorporation of the personnel of hospitals and clinics into the Volkssturm.80 There was huge disruption of the railways. If a journey had to be undertaken and even if a place on a train could be found, delays of many hours were to be expected. People coped as best they could under the extremely difficult circumstances. But the cuts in public services had complicating side effects. Electricity cuts meant, for instance, that shops were shutting early, when it became too dark for business, leaving no possibility for those in work to buy food in the early evening hours. And once the electricity was restored, in mid-evening, there was often an air-raid alarm so that people had no time to eat.81
A source of particular concern to the millions of families desperate for news of sons, brothers, fathers or other close relatives at the front was that postal services were in a state of near collapse. By late March, post offices had often been put out of action by bombing. Telephone, telegraph and rail communications had largely broken down for ordinary citizens, and often, too, for public authorities and businesses.82 The Reich Post Minister, Wilhelm Ohnesorge, laid down stipulations for ensuring a minimum postal service. If trains were unavailable, motor vehicles had to be used to shuttle post to the nearest functioning railway station. If no vehicles were available, local transport had to be requisitioned. In the last resort, the most urgent post was to be carried by bicycle or on foot in rucksacks.83
There was, it is true, still a veneer of what passed for ‘normality’ in the diminishing parts of Germany not under occupation or sucked into the fighting zones, though anything resembling civic society had long since vanished. One of the few places bomb-threatened people of big cities found any semblance of communal activity in these weeks was in the air-raid shelter.84 Work itself, however hard, tedious and long, must have been for many a distraction from the heavy worries and burdens of daily life. And wages and salaries continued to be paid as Germany collapsed. Newspapers still appeared—though by March there were only 814 of them (compared with 2,075 daily papers in 1937), and they were only two to four pages in length. Periodicals had been cut back still further because of the shortage of paper and other difficulties; only 458 out of 4,789 in pre-war times were still in circulation.85 Radio remained the most important means of communication (though power cuts meant big interruptions to programmes), not just for propaganda but also for entertainment programmes. The main transmitters in big cities continued to function to the end. Not least, the radio was crucial for giving warnings of approaching bombers, while receivers in air-raid shelters passed on Party directives following raids.86 Despite stiff penalties, many continued surreptitiously to listen to enemy broadcasts, especially the BBC. People could still find escapism in the cinema. Entertainment films provided a temporary release from the horrors and misery of reality. They were more attractive than the ‘fight-on’ propaganda conveyed through films like Kolberg (which can only have reminded people of what was actually happening in the town at the time) or newsreels that could only show Germany’s desperate plight. However, bombing of cinema buildings, blackouts and air-raid alarms had taken their toll on attendance. And for those who did go to the cinema, leaving the building was to re-enter a reality beyond the imagination of any film producer.
Outside the most war-ravaged zones and the worst bombed areas of the big cities, a still functioning, if hugely creaking, bureaucracy and the far-reaching tentacles of Party control ensured that skeletal and emergency administration, accompanied by much hand-to-mouth improvisation, continued in some measure to operate.
Routine administration carried on—even with much reduced personnel through recruitment to the Wehrmacht. Forms, more of them than ever, had to be completed, reports filed, the myriad tasks of minor bureaucracy (which civil servants down the ranks had always done) still undertaken. The usual local health and social welfare, finance and economic issues, even building planning, continued amid the mayhem, however unreal it often seemed.87 And local police stations were still sending in their reports on maintenance of ‘order’ down to the end. Much of the work of local and regional authorities was, however, inevitably preoccupied with finding housing for those bombed out of their homes, trying to cope with the influx of refugees, organizing food rations and distribution of increasingly stretched provisions, regulating air-raid measures88 and the deployment of the hard-pressed fire service (many of whom were volunteers, taken out of their normal work for fire-brigade duties).89 Few of the lower-ranking civil servants were by now, if they ever had been, inspired by gung-ho Nazi propaganda and sloganeering about fighting to the last ditch. But hardly any would have contemplated doing anything other than what they saw as their duty to ensure that they carried out their work as conscientiously and efficiently as possible. They were merely small cogs in a big machine. But they did their best, even at this late stage, to ensure that the machine continued to function as well as possible.
In any case, much of their work had been usurped by Party functionaries.90 Here the level of political commitment was still far greater, and where it was flagging a sense of self-protection against possibly costly reproaches from higher Party offices could produce its own activism.91 Local and District Leaders, down to Block Leaders based in tenement blocks, would do all they could to carry out the directions of the Gauleiter in all matters of civil defence, organizing anti-aircraft batteries, the running of air-raid bunkers, clearing up after air raids and, through the NSV, providing whatever social welfare was possible.92 But all this frenetic activism was coupled with still unceasing attempts to mobilize the population and instil in them the need to fight on. However ineffective the actions of the local Party functionaries were in practice, and whatever antipathies they now encountered as the end approached, they still served as a crucial control mechanism on the population. Even the NSV, the huge Party welfare organization (which had employed more than 60,000 people full-time, mainly women, in mid-194493), was in essence still a vehicle for political control, whatever work it did—in addition to (and often in competition with) state-run welfare—to help the victims of bombing raids, provide for wounded soldiers, organize evacuations or take care of refugees. The Party’s organizational structures, still incorporating (if affiliates are included) huge numbers of citizens, mobilizing young Germans as ‘flak helpers’ in anti-aircraft defence, and half a million women for service as ‘Wehrmacht assistants’ (then some of these even for fighting),94 ensured that the overwhelming majority of citizens remained compliant even as the regime crumbled. Few were prepared to risk stepping out of line. Political dissidence could prove lethal for any individual, and was regarded by most people as not just foolhardy but unnecessary as the end loomed.