World War 2
The German Home Front
Hitler's war plans had envisaged a series of short, sharp campaigns. No preparations had been made to fight the 'Total War', to which the British had embraced from 1940. Sweeping German victories in France and Russia early on spared most Germans the hardships of war. Goods of all kinds flooded into Germany from the conquered territories. Until 1941 the peacetime routines of work, school and annual holidays for the German population were not disturbed.
The German war industry ran smoothly in the first two years of the war, the civilization in Germany was more-or-less un-changed, while the wives of soldiers away at the war lived comfortably off their state allowances; it was not until 1941 that any attempt was made to direct women into war factories. However, rationing and shortages began to bite in 1942 as Allied bombers brought German civilians onto the front line and soon losses mounted on the Eastern Front.
It was not until the beginning of 1943, when the tide was already turning against Germany , that they mobilized to fight 'Total War' under the overall direction of Hitler's proaganda chief and right-hand-man Josef Goebbels. But, even then the war economy remained a mass of contradictions and un-organisation, with six million workers still producing consumer goods and one and a half million women employed as maids and cooks. Corruption and waste, bred by the warring Nazi Party encouraged by Hitler as a means of preserving his own authority, bedevilled the German home front to the end of the war. The whole system would have collapsed had it not been for the millions of slave workers cattled in to Germany from Eastern Europe.
From 1943 Allied bombers inflicted increasingly heavy damage on Germany's cities. Two-thirds of Hamburg's population were evacuated after the fire raids of August 1943; as the end of the war approached every third house in Berlin had been either destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.
Ration cards were distributed to bombed-out civilians, the general diet of many wartime German civilians consisted of; weak ersatz coffee, bread rolls and powdered eggs - diluted and stirred, scrambled and fried and tasted of glue.