Don A. Gregory - Hitler’s Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
Pen & Sword History
an imprint of
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Copyright 2016

ISBN: 978 1 47385 820 6
PDF ISBN: 978 1 47385 823 7
EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47385 822 0
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The right of Don A. Gregory and Wilhelm R. Gehlen to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
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To the memory of our mothers

Contents

List of Plates

Overture

A twelve-year-old Hitler Youth single-handedly trying to save the Thousand-Year Reich from destruction in 1945 might seem a little far-fetched today, but it was not so far from the truth at the time. Millions of us had the same idea, but that is only a small part of what life was about during the last days of the war. As early as 1941, some food items were becoming scarce at home and in the final months of the war, most of Germanys soldiers and civilians were hungry. Trying to save themselves and their families became more important than continuing to fight for a lost cause. After the war, Germans began starving by the thousands. It was a struggle for many just to find enough food to survive from day to day. This book is my small contribution to history as seen through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a small rural community just outside Mnchen-Gladbach, or M-G as those who lived there called it. I was barely a teenager when the walls of the Reich Chancellery came crashing down but some events are as real today as they were then.

I never learned English in school and my first teachers for that foreign language were American GIs who spoke everything from New York Yankee to Mississippi Rebel. My native language is German or more correctly, a lower Rhine German slang. I dont have a high school education or a college degree in political science and I have never been politically active. I have never voted for any political party and do not support one now. I do listen to the politicians promises, but when the voting is over and done with, those promises all go out the window, whether we are talking about Washington, the German Bundestag, the Kremlin or some capital in deepest Africa. As I have said many times since I became an adult, the only honest politician I ever remember was Adolf Hitler. In his campaigning he said, Give me five years and you wont recognise Germany and he told the truth. The Germany of 1938 was nothing like the Germany of 1933 but then the Germany of 1945 was nothing like the Germany of 1940 either.

Times were bad, much worse than just eating horsemeat or using discarded cement bags for toilet paper. Folks can get by without a broom or new clothes every year but one has to eat. Americans shouldnt say that could never happen here, because in fact it did. The Great Depression of the early 1930s didnt just happen in the United States; it was far worse in Germany and it had already been going on for a decade. Adolf Hitler promised us that things would get better if we would just elect him Chancellor. Contrary to what you may have been taught, we did have elections and we elected Hitler, although maybe not quite fair and square by American standards of today, but by European standards of the time, it was not an unusual election. He got hold of the government in January 1933, the year I was born, and sure enough things got better almost overnight and kept getting better even after the war came. After the war was lost however, things were even worse than during the depression if you can believe it. Hitlers Thousand-Year Reich had only lasted twelve years, but for a young boy, twelve years is forever.

I want to describe in this book our daily life in the final years of the Second World War and shortly after. It was a time when the whole world went mad; when people in Germany lived on four ounces of rock-hard margarine and one egg per week and whatever else they could find that wouldnt kill them if they ate it. It was a time when a simple broom handle would cost you practically nothing but you had to have three or four permits with stamps and signatures to get one if it was available. Seventy-plus years is a long time to remember some of these things but theyre a part of my childhood and I do have some notes I made, and most importantly, I have my mothers cookbook where she wrote down recipes that she tried and then tested on us. Several of those recipes are included at the end of this book.

There is an old German dialect proverb that translates as, What a farmer cant grow himself, he wont eat. Well, today, when food is plentiful, it is easy to pick and choose what you eat, but in the times described here, you ate what was available or you starved. Life was as simple as that and food was always on your mind. We ate without questioning what it was or where it came from. This however is not a gardening guide or a cookbook. It is the survival guide we created at the time to get us through another day. Skinny cooks cant be trusted is one of my favourite sayings today, but when I was a boy, you would have had a difficult time finding a cook who wasnt skinny. There were new proverbs created toward the end of the war that reflected the times. Altes Brot ist nicht hart, kein Brot, das ist hart was often heard. This is not difficult to translate even if you dont know much German: Old bread is not hard; no bread at all is hard.

Just recently I came across an article in the Washington Post online that said that 40 per cent of US domestic food production is wasted and goes into the dustbin. A quick calculation tells me that this is food for about 130 million people out of a population of 300 million. Germany had eighty million in the war years, not counting the occupied areas. If Germany had wasted 40 per cent of its food production then, no German would be alive today to tell the tale. A few days after that article was published, another guru predicted an acute food shortage in the not-so-distant future, not only in the US, but worldwide. My advice is to get your shovels and hoes out now and make a garden. The food will taste better and be better for you.

Thousands of good (and bad) recipe books have been published and they look good as exotic decorations on kitchen bookshelves, but most are never read by anyone preparing the meals. After all, a can of soup or a bowl of Corn Flakes is much simpler. Good cooking takes time and skill. Books have also been written about essential vitamins one must have to live a long and healthy life, but we had none of these books in our house. Nobody in our family knew what a vitamin looked like. I have never seen one; neither have I ever seen a calorie. We were given cod liver oil that is supposed to be full of Vitamin A, but believe me, the stuff was awful. It tasted like fish gone bad and looked like snot. To us kids who had to take a daily dose of the stuff, it was public enemy number one. Amazingly, there was a never-ending supply of it right up to 1947. Allied bombers had no problem hitting blacksmith shops and railway stations, but no enemy bomber was able to pinpoint the Hells kitchen that made millions of gallons of cod liver oil. We kids, given the chance, would have told Winston Churchill right where it was and to bomb the place. In 1947, all of a sudden, supplies dried up. Why? We never figured that out, but nobody died of Vitamin A deficiency afterwards. Maybe all of us had enough cod liver oil stored up in our bodies to last a lifetime.