"Old Magazine Articles"

The attached 1941 Collier's Magazine article reported on how the people of Berlin were faring after one solid year of R.A.F. bombing. By war's end it was estimated that as many as 580,000 Germans had been killed as a result of the Allied bombing campaign (many of them were children and far more women than men). This article examines what Berlin life was like when the bombs fell.

Click here to read about the bombing of Japan.

This Collier's article clearly illustrated the gloom that hung over the German home front of 1943:

"Nobody escapes war service in Germany. Children serve in air-raid squads; women work very hard...The black market flourishes everywhere. More fats are required, as are fruits and vegetables, for the people's strength is declining. A report I have seen of Health Minister Conti shows that the mortality rate for some diseases rose 49 percent in 1941 - 1942."

Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.

"We cannot conduct a Gallup poll in Germany, but we can find out by other opinion polls and from other inquiring reporters what the average German is thinking. Our reporters are the Nazis themselves. The poll is tallied daily at short-wave listening stations, among them that of the Columbia Broadcasting System. The C.B.S. corps of engineers monitors and records and interprets the voices of the enemy."

"The Nazi propaganda here analyzed is a record of Nazi failure to keep the German people from thinking 'non-German' thoughts and failure to prevent the record from being known."

This article is illustrated with fourteen W.W. II photographs.

Here is a 1943 article that was cabled from Stockholm, Sweden, relaying assorted eyewitness accounts of the Allied bombing campaign over the German city of Hamburg in 1943:

"The people of Germany have now learned, through the terror-filled hours of sleepless nights and days, that air mastery, the annihilating blitz weapon of the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, has been taken over by by the Allies...The most terrible of these punches has been the flood of nitroglycerin and phosphorus that in five days and nights destroyed Hamburg."

Click here to read about the bombing of Japan.

It was an Englishman nick-named "Bomber Harris" who planned and organized the nightly raids over Nazi Germany: click here to read about him.

The misery that lingered over the W.W. II German home front is well documented and many of the issues concerning melancholy, hunger and thirst can be read in the attached assortment of letters that were pulled from the bloodied uniforms of the thousands of dead Nazi soldiers that surrounded the city of Stalingrad in 1943. These personal correspondences by German parents, wives and sweethearts present a thorough look at the dreariness that lingered over the German home front.

Here is one of the reviews of Pattern of Conquest, a book by Joseph C. Harsch (1905 – 1998) - a CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR correspondent who had been posted to Germany during the earliest years of the war:

"Harsch says that German morale is 'fundamentally unsound' however, and that it took a bad beating when the RAF first bombed Berlin, which Marshal Goering had said would happen only 'over his dead body'. ('Have you heard the news?' Berliners asked each other, after the first raids. 'Goering's dead.')"

Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.

"Berliners with an ear cocked to the cold east wind could hear the drums of doom: The heavy roll of Russian artillery along the Oder River. By night, flares from Soviet planes bombing the Berlin-Frankfurt highway lit up the eastern horizon."

"The Free German Movement is vigorously gnawing away at the very roots of Naziism with teeth filed to needle sharpness. Our organizations are fighting Hitler, at home or in South America with his own weapons. We have consolidated earlier gains against Hitler with important new gains."

So wrote Dr. Otto Strasser (1897 – 1974) who oversaw the Free German Movement, the Black Front and other Nazi resistance organizations. He must have been pretty effective, the Nazis put a half-million dollar price on his head.

"Comparing the American [daylight] raids with the RAF [nighttime] incursions, it was certainly a great shock to Berliners to find their city now open to round-the-clock bombing."

"We don't mind the Yanks who come when the sun shines and it's warm. It's the Tommies sneaking in at night that we don't like so much."

This Newsweek article reported on the first Red Air Force bombing raid on the city of Berlin (August 11, 1941). The Soviets kept the pressure up for a few more weeks until their airfield was overrun in September.

"From inside Germany last week emerged the picture of a state that by all normal standards was in the last stages of dissolution... All signs indicated a physical breakdown perhaps as great as that of France in 1940... Refugees, mostly women and children with blankets around their bodies and shawls on their heads to protect them from the sub-zero weather, queue up for hours outside bakeries to get a loaf of bread. Draftees ride tanks in never-ending columns."

"The most striking thing about Germany today is its quiet. There is no noise. The people are sullen... There are no parades, no bands, no singing in Germany now. When American internees heard the Allied bombers, saw cities in flames and felt the shock of four-ton bombs, they knew why."

This account of war-torn Germany was written by one of those internees who was incarcerated since December of 1941 and subsequently released in March, 1944.

"[Berlin,] the target of 69 RAF raids so far, [the city] has been hit hard only a few times this year and underwent no raids during 1942. On the morale front it ranks ahead of all other German cities. When the others were raided the outcry of the Germans was bitter but local. When Berlin hit groans rose from all over Germany. If RAF night raiders should raze the capital by fire, as they did Hamburg, the whole German nation would suffer the shock of Berliners... Goebbels begged them to stand up under bombs as stoutly as the British did in 1940."

PM correspondent Richard O. Boyer (1903 – 1973) was in Berlin in June of 1940 when Paris fell to the German Army. He was dumbstruck by the surprising gloominess that hung heavily upon the German people the week of that great victory:

"I could not understand it all and could scarcely believe the testimony of my own eyes. The scarlet banners with their black swastikas that garlanded the city everywhere in response to Hitler's orders seemed only to emphasize the worried melancholy. The victory bells that rang each day at noon acquired the sound of a funeral dirge when one looked at the tired, pinched faces of the Germans hurrying along the pavements ... When I expressed surprise to a glum man sitting near me he glanced impatiently up and only said, 'We celebrated once in 1914'."

The Japanese home front suffered from tuberculosis - click here to read about it...

Throughout the course of the Second World War, the city of Munich was bombed seventy-four times by both the Royal Air Force as well as the U.S. Army Air Corps. The attached article gives an account of the third of these attacks.

"Giant four-motored planes flew in over their targets so low that they could clearly see the Brown House and the Beer Hall where Hitler organized his 1923 putsch... The citizens of Munich will, no doubt, be thinking of their Fuehrer today as they survey the bombed-out buildings and piles of rubble in the streets where Hitler first harangued them about his political ideas."

A report by a Swiss journalist as to what becomes of the Germans who are left homeless after the bombings:

"In most cities they immediately get 200 marks cash payment. The money is fresh and clean from the press... With cup in hand, the bombed-outers wait in the streets for the army goulash truck to drive up and give them a feed. Sometimes they wait for as much forty-eight hours. People who don't like or cannot get the army goulash build themselves a fire and cook the horses, dogs and cats that lie around the street..."

Here is an eyewitness account of the bleak lives lead by Berliners during the summer of 1943:

"The food situation in Berlin is horrible. At the [Grand Hotel Esplanade] there was no choice on the menu. You either ate what was there or went hungry... There was no bread or butter served at the hotel... The people of Berlin were unfriendly and distant. Although I could not speak their language, I could sense their fear of bombing and disgust with the war. They seemed to be mechanical men, robots, just following daily routine."

In 1941 Hitler ordered the home front to send as much warm clothing as they could spare to the army on the Russian front - you can read about it here