"It was as though Berlin were dead." -- Daily Life in Blockaded Berlin

 The daily life of Berliners during the Soviet Blockade varied depending on many factors. It was impacted by which Sector they lived in, whether they were employed or not, whether they had intact or improvised housing and more. Yet one thing Berliners shared regardless of other circumstances: life was hard.

 

One dominant fact remembered by almost all observers was the darkness. One resident of Berlin at the time wrote:

It was as though Berlin were dead. The electricity was turned off most of the time, and there was no glimmer of light…There were no street lights, and the merest flicker of ghostly candles glowed through the windows of the houses that had escaped destruction.[i]

Other residents describe how the prevailing darkness evoked primeval fears. The darkness was dangerous. In it lurked not only the usual dangers of thieves and murderers, but kidnappers and Russians. Women, it is said, walked only in the middle of the wide empty streets, frightened of every building and side-street where Russians might still be lurking. Even the Americans stationed in Berlin remember that a flashlight was essential for movement, and one mechanic stationed at Tempelhof claims that if he strayed too far after dark “I had to thread my way through streets of rubble back to Tempelhof by following the C-54 landing lights on their final approach.”[ii]

Another Berliner described life in Blockaded Berlin to a friend outside the city in a letter:

We sit and wait. We grope about the apartment like the blind. We yawn and talk about the Blockade. Whether the Airlift will work and whether Berlin will be able to hold out… Then “Ah!” we call out simultaneously, “Light!” We run about, we laugh and shout, as if we had been drinking wine. The stove! The radio! We cook, we wash, we iron, we listen to the news. Above all, we listen to the news. RIAS broadcasts every hour, all through the night. We listen to the East Radio and the West Radio. Overhead the droning of the aircraft. Every three minutes…It is a matter of nerves. Between midnight and 2 am [when we have light] we feel we have not lost our nerve. We aren’t doormats, but heroes.[iii]

As temperatures dropped, the lack of heat became as characteristic of the Blockade-period as the darkness. Houses with “central heating” – i.e. heated with oil or gas from a central heating plant – were basically unheated. The best people could do was wear layers of winter clothes, including their outdoor coats, in their houses. Many people, particularly the elderly and small children, spent almost the entire winter in bed wearing as many clothes as they could under the bed-clothes. If they had an electric stove, this could be turned on full during the few hours during the day when there was electricity. Some people would boil water on the stove to distribute steam-heat throughout the apartment, but this generally froze on the ceiling creating a thin layer of ice, so the benefits were doubtful.

Older houses which had individual coal-ovens in each apartment could still be heated to a certain extent with coal – but this had to be flown in and so was tightly rationed. Given the demand for coal for the power-plants producing the essential electricity for the city, the hospitals, bakeries, and factories, the authorities had determined that that only 22,000 tons of coal per month could be allocated to private households. Furthermore, these coal supplies were not distributed evenly. Households with children, elderly or ill members received higher rations, leaving an “ordinary” household (i.e. without any of the above special categories) with as little as 12.5 kilos of coal per month. This induced many otherwise honest citizens to turn to dishonest means of obtaining a bit more fuel. One favourite means of supplementing coal rations, for example, was for agile boys to climb onto the back of coal lorries and shake or scoop off what they could to an accomplice on the ground. Another young Berliner remembers that his aunt and uncle tore down an old wooden fence in the dark of night for the firewood it would provide. His aunt “kept a watch for the police, and if they approached, [his aunt and uncle] embraced and pretended to be lovers.”[iv]

The Western Allies, after calculating how much heat 22,000 tons of coal would produce for a population of over 2 million, came to the conclusion that they were heading for a disaster. They decided on Oct. 7 that it would be necessary to supplement the coal supplies with wood. It was already possible for people to burn the roots of trees already cut down if they were willing to do the work of digging them up, but city-dwellers, often women with no man in the house, found the task of digging and sawing very daunting. Furthermore, ovens designed for coal did not always burn wood well. People still tell horror stories of apartments filled with filthy black smoke for the sake of a pitiable amount of heat.

Nevertheless, the Allies, faced with a severe shortfall in coal and remembering the bitter winter of 1945-1946 in which hundreds of people had frozen to death in Berlin, decided that Berlin’s remaining forests would have to be sacrificed. An estimated 350,000 cubic metres of wood was thought needed. To the utter surprise of the Allied military authorities, a public outcry ensued. The Berliners made it clear that they preferred freezing to de-forestation. The City Council, responding to the public outcry, proposed cutting down “only” 120,000 cubic meters, or roughly one third of the Allied figure. The Allies agreed to start with this figure, fully expecting that the Berliners would become less “ecological” when the weather got colder. They did not, and Berlin’s forests, although mutilated, were not destroyed.

Another shortage that characterized the Blockade was petrol. There was no petrol for private vehicles, and petrol for official vehicles – even of the Allies – was strictly rationed. Busses of the public transport network and ambulances had priority. Throughout the blockade, there was not one petrol-powered taxi operating in Berlin. In short, people were dependent on public transport, bicycles, or their own two feet. The trams and underground only operated from 6 am until 6 pm. The last trams of the day were therefore always overcrowded, with people clinging to the outside as the over-loaded, ancient tramcars swayed and strained through the streets, hardly able to carry their excessive load. What bicycles had not been “confiscated” by the Russians were often in poor condition or completely lacking tires, thus one RAF airman remembers vividly the “most unforgettable noise of the steel rims on the cobbled streets.”[v] The sheer distances in Berlin, a city encompassing 889 square kilometers, however, made walking completely impractical in many instances.

One resident, who had been a teenager at the time, summarised all these features together simply and nostalgically:

Cold showers and early meals, and walking home at night in the dark as there was no street lighting, nor was the U-bahn working.[vi]

Shortages of soap and deodorant were another feature of the Blockade-period that left memories. The German ration was just one quarter of that for occupation forces, or roughly one bar of soap per month per person. Clothing was effectively unavailable (except silk stockings), and even sewing and mending was difficult since thread, needles and cloth came into the city only in very limited quantities.

But clothing could on the whole be made to last a little longer. Food was needed daily. Rations were meagre, as noted earlier, as little as one third of the average daily caloric intake of Americans at this time. One child growing up in Berlin at this time remembers:

My family, which consisted of my widowed mother, my grandmother, three boys and a girl, was allotted one stick of margarine a week. My grandmother sliced it so thin, you couldn’t see it when spread on a slice of dark bread.[vii]

But the Allies were, in fact, with admirable efficiency ensuring that everyone in Berlin got enough calories per day to survive. The form in which those calories were delivered, however, left much to be desired. Quality and variety was sacrificed to sheer quantity and even the Allied garrisons suffered from the decline in quality, if to a lesser degree. The quality of food at official American functions was so bad, in fact, that the Soviets felt justified in complaining about it. The American Commandant, Colonel Howley was not fazed, however. When his counterpart, Soviet General Kotikov, complained that the chicken served at an official luncheon was “tough.” He fired back: “It ought to be. It had to fly all the way from Frankfurt.”[viii] However, for every one living on food brought in by air transport, the greatest problem was simply that virtually everything flown into Berlin was dehydrated.

The dried food spawned many jokes. The Berliners noted that probably even their humour was flown in by the airlift – i.e. very dry. Others said that all that was missing was for the Allies to fly in the water in dehydrated form. Mothers were delighted with the powered milk “because you didn’t have to wash the diapers any more; it was enough just to shake them out.” As Christmas approached, the rumours flew that the Allies would fly in “powdered Christmas Trees” – just add water. Nevertheless, for all the hardships, the Berliners reminded each other that “things could be worse: the Americans could be blockading the city and the Soviets attempting to supply us.” Or they complained that “From morning to night we’re heroes. Wouldn’t it be nice to relax once in a while?”

The dried food spawned creative cooking as well as jokes. The elder generations particularly had experience in the art of stretching inadequate rations stretching back to the First World War. People turned balconies and window-sills into tiny kitchen gardens. Likewise the medians of boulevards, unused railways and parks were dug up for vegetable gardens by those that did not already have one of the many garden plots which had become a feature of the Berlin landscape long before the War. Stinging nettles, dandelions and other objects generally viewed as inedible found their way into the Berliner diet. That said, it is notably not a feature of Blockade stories that pet-owners had to fear for the lives of their beloved four-legged companions. Hay was – over the protest of some Americans – even flown in during the blockade for the horses of Berlin, most of which were in British ownership.

For as long as possible, the Berliners also sought to supplement the dried rations provided by the Airlift with fresh fruits, vegetables and dairy products from the surrounding countryside. Berlin was traditionally fed from Brandenburg, the rural province surrounding Berlin. Berliners had long travelled to Brandenburg for fresh things. During the war, the tradition of the “hamster” trips to purchase food-stuffs from farmers to supplement official rations had started. There were two kinds of “hamster” trippers: those who went with empty sacks to scavenge for leftovers in already harvested or abandoned fields or look for wild mushrooms, nuts and fruits, and those who travelled with silver, porcelain, linens and other objects of value in order to trade with farmers. During the Blockade these “hamster trips” continued. According to the East German police in the period between September 27 and Oct. 3, 1948 alone, an estimated 400,000 “hamster-trips” took place, bringing in no less than 7,000 tons of foodstuffs to the beleaguered city.

Clearly, the Soviets could not allow this to continue if their Blockade was to be a success. A crack-down was inevitable. In early September, as the political tensions and divisions in the city were sharpening, the overcrowded trains arriving in Berlin were with increasing frequency met by a cordon of Eastern Sector police blocking all exits from the station. Everyone would then be forced to surrender all their treasures. “Crying, helpless and full of hatred,” the returning “Hamster-trippers” had to obey – and go home empty-handed to the hungry children and parents. And that was true whether the returning “hamster” was resident in East or West Berlin.

On the positive side, no account of Berlin during the Blockade would be complete without mention of the CARE packages, more than 200,000 of which reached Berlin during the Blockade. This was a private initiative, founded in November 1945 by 22 different charitable organisations and dubbed “Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe – CARE.” Millions of Americans donated $10 a piece and this purchased the contents of one package full of basic necessities. The contents of each package varied slightly; they were not identical but the value of each was the same. Common contents were: canned meat, canned milk, sugar, coffee, chocolate, cigarettes, soap, matches and toilet paper. Berliners, particularly children, report that often they saw many things for the first time in their lives in a CARE package – dried cake mix, canned maize, crackers, peanuts and peanut-butter. What one did not wish to consume personally, one could sell or trade for objects one did want. Yet the most valued object in the CARE package was often the little note from the donor with his/her name and return address. This personalization of the giving gave it an incalculable dimension far beyond the caloric value of the contents. From thank-you notes grew correspondence, which sometimes led to visits across the Atlantic in both directions. When the author first went to Berlin in 1992, she was thanked on more than one occasion – merely because she was an American – not for the Airlift as a whole but for the CARE packages.

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[i] Dr. Wilhelm Kremer, quoted in Robert Rodrigo, The Berlin Airlift, Cassel and Company, 1960, p. 116.

[ii] Cpl. John Ross, quoted in Edwin Gere,The Unheralded: Men and Women of the Berlin Blockade and Airlift, Trafford, 2003, p. 90.

[iii] Ruth Andreas Friedrich, quoted in Gerhard Keiderling, Rosinenbomber ueber Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1998, p. 239.

[iv] Alexander Gunkel, quoted in Gere, p. 176.

[v] Geoffrey W. Smith, “Recollections,” p.3.

[vi] Daniel Bunting, Berlin Airlift Veteran’s Association website; Bunting was the son of an American officers stationed in Berlin.

[vii] Alexander Gunkel, quoted in Gere, p. 176.

[viii] Col. Frank Howley, quoted in Thomas Parrish, Berlin in the Balance: The Blockade, The Airlift and the First Major Battle of the Cold War, Perseus Books, 1998, p. 310.

NOTE: The content of this blog post is based on Helena P. Schrader. The Blockade Breakers. Pen & Sword, 2008.

The Berlin Airlift is the subject of Bridge to Tomorrow, a trilogy of novels starting with Cold Peace.

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