Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The most imaginative response to the shortages, albeit one that smacked of desperation, was the introduction of rural holidays for urban youth. Just as one generation later children would be evacuated from the major conurbations in order to avoid Allied bombing, so in the second half of the First World War young Germans and Austrians were put on trains to the countryside in order to escape hunger. In both countries, the initiative at first came from private charity. In Austria, Styrian charities sent more than a thousand children to the countryside in 1917. The action drew the state’s interest and at the end of March 1918 the Kaiser Karl-Wohlfahrtswerk, the Emperor’s charity, established the ‘Kinder aufs Land’ (‘Children in the Countryside’) and ‘Kinder zu Gast’ (‘Children as Guests’) programmes. In 1918 these organized 64,805 malnourished children to be sent from Austria to Hungary. The Austrian countryside also played its part: 26,542 city children from Bohemia went to farms in Bohemia, Moravia and Upper Austria in order to be fed.75 The German programme, run by the charity Landaufenthalt für Stadtkinder (Countryside Stays for Urban Children) was earlier and bigger; the fact that it was managed by a private organization again testifies to the strength of German civil society. The programme began in 1916 by sending 60,000 undernourished children to recover in the countryside. In 1917 schools and Church authorities were also mobilized, resulting in no fewer than 575,000 children in 1917 and another 300,000 in 1918 going on feeding holidays of one to five months. Hosts received nominal monetary compensation and the children were expected to carry out ‘light’ work in the fields. The scheme was a complete success. It not only helped to mitigate the impact of shortages and blockade on society’s most vulnerable group, the children, but it also helped to repair some of the growing acrimony between town and countryside.76

  Few, either during the war or afterwards, have found much to praise about German or Habsburg food administration. Austrians were doomed, especially after the loss of Galicia, by the Dualist system and Hungarian intransigence. However, their government also bore responsibility for its slow response to a clearly looming crisis. Few initiatives came from Austrian administrators; instead, they looked north and copied the Germans when pressured by outraged public opinion. The Reich’s food administrators deserve a little more credit. Centralization was incomplete and belated, there was huge inefficiency and disastrous errors were made through ignorance and poorly thought-out measures. Public pressure rather than planning drove bureaucratic reforms. Yet the fact that throughout the war Germany’s official ration was, in spite of a less favourable initial food base, higher than that in Austria and, still more significantly, Hungary, does speak in the administrators’ favour. If mass starvation was avoided, this was also due in no small part to initiatives by local officials. Nonetheless, this was not enough. In both powers, food was distributed neither equally nor in adequate quantities. Malnutrition, exhaustion and illness still broke human bodies, and the consequent public rage and disillusionment eroded the legitimacy of governments and shattered societies.

  SHATTERED SOCIETIES

  Nothing did more than the food shortages to undermine the solidarity so carefully nurtured in 1914 and 1915. Hunger made people irritable, jealous, and prone to the nervousness and easy lapses into delusion so characteristic of wartime mentality. The fact that food had become the most prized commodity upturned the peacetime social order. Especially for the middle classes, this was traumatic. An education, cultivation or profession brought few rewards in wartime. A good desk job was a burden when competing for food against social inferiors in armament factories. Sophisticated city types now kowtowed to rustics, who before the war would have been ignored or mocked. The food shortages spectacularly undermined the Burgfrieden. In stark contrast to the cohesive communities portrayed by early propaganda, Germans and Austro-Hungarians divided into competing interest groups, all seeking to allay their hunger.

  The earliest and deepest division was that between food producers in the countryside and urban consumers. By the end of 1916, German Home Military Commands were warning of ‘the sharpening of the conflict between city and countryside’, calling it ‘one of the most noticeable and distressing manifestations of the war’.77 Farmers were better fed than anybody, yet still had good reason to feel aggrieved. In peacetime, German and Hungarian economic policies had favoured agricultural producers. Wartime provisioning turned state priorities on their head. Faced with the need to feed large armies and a frustrated urban population, the focus switched to protecting consumers. In the first two years of war, maximum prices were imposed in order to achieve this objective. These had a further major advantage in that they suppressed inflation, but they offered no incentive to farmers to produce more and they rarely took account of rising production costs. The patchy and uncoordinated way in which controls were introduced led to a battle of wits between farmers and officials in which the loser was the urban consumer. Producers, confronted in 1915 by expensive fodder, much of which had been imported before the war, low official prices for cereals and potatoes and an absence of controls on meat, responded by withdrawing cereals and potatoes from the market and using them to feed livestock. Officials attempted to rebalance production by ordering pig culls, imposing controls on meat and tinkering with other maximum prices. Delivery quotas were gradually introduced and in 1917 and 1918 farms were searched for undeclared livestock and produce. Only in the second half of the war did the authorities reach for incentives, but by this time the economy had shifted to full-scale war production, there was little peasants could buy with the extra cash, and so their effect was limited. Instead, official measures inadvertently promoted a thriving black market, especially in meat and dairy products. Although farmers generally stayed one step ahead, they resented a system that they regarded as arbitrary and fixed against them.78 A sense of persecution grew, inflaming both a desire for peace and distrust of the authorities. When, in the autumn of 1916, the Reich advertised its Fifth War Loan, farmers withdrew their money from savings accounts, as rumours circulated that the government might confiscate it in order to fund the war effort.79

  The German government recognized the immense danger of an alienated countryside. As the Ministry of Agriculture warned on 22 February 1917, ‘a firm influence over the rural population appears . . . so much the more necessary as Germany’s final victory depends just as much on the . . . nourishment of our people as on the defeat of our enemy by the army and the fleet’.80 A propaganda offensive opened to encourage farmers to release food onto the market at official prices. The War Press Office imaginatively arranged excursions to enable them to see for themselves the deprivation in the cities.81 In the winter of 1916, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg personally called for extra food and especially for fats for the ‘heavy workers’ in munitions factories. Yet even the people’s hero failed to move the hard hearts of farmers: in Bavaria, his appeal raised just an extra quarter pound’s worth of meat for each industrial worker.82

  The agricultural population’s refusal to cooperate was a reflection not only of its anger towards the authorities but also of its alienation from city dwellers. Tales of urban suffering elicited limited sympathy, for farmers’ lives were also difficult. By 1916 nearly half of Germany’s farms were run by women, who had of necessity not only continued with their own tasks but also taken over the physically demanding responsibilities of their conscripted husbands and labourers. At the busiest period of the year, harvest time, it was common for the women to be out in the fields from three in the morning until nine at night. The plague of city ‘hamsters’ who descended on the countryside every weekend, stampeding across land and damaging or stealing crops, did not encourage pity. Black-market transactions also soured relations on both sides. To city dwellers, they proved that their rural compatriots were cheating the system. Farmers, by contrast, concluded from the high prices they were offered that the urban population was not so hard up as it claimed. Sometimes there were confrontations. Farmers who did not wish to sell might be threatened or assaul
ted. On other occasions, the rural populace resorted to violence to rid themselves of hungry city pests. Inhabitants of Austria’s capital looking for food in the countryside had stones thrown at them and were chased away with shouts of ‘Viennese riff-raff! Go home, you’re eating us all out of house and home!’83

  Urban consumers were one in their agreement that farmers’ avarice and profiteering were ruining the country. In Germany, people blamed the absence of potatoes at the end of 1916 on producers hoarding them until the spring, when they would get better prices. In Austria, the Viennese nurtured similar suspicions. Stories circulated of pigs being fed on prime barley while the urban population was left with husks and fodder.84 However, this was about all that united city dwellers. Food shortages inflamed urban class antagonisms. The middle classes justly complained about bearing an unfair share of wartime hardship. The anger and frustration felt by white-collar workers across the Reich and in Austria-Hungary were well expressed in a resolution passed unanimously in August 1916 by the Wiesbaden branch of the ‘Middle-Class Association for Central Germany’ (Mittelsstandsvereinigung für Mitteldeutschland), an organization boasting 700,000 members nationwide. ‘We are still very far removed from the genuinely equal people’s food supply about which one hears so much praise and bragging,’ members lamented. The state organized its price setting, they wrongly asserted, solely for the benefit of farmers and landowners. The white-collar workers observed bitterly that while ‘very poor women and members of the working and middle classes’ stood for hours in all weathers waiting to buy food, the ‘upper ten thousand’ apparently found queuing unnecessary. The real enemy was obviously domestic: ‘Not the English, but the profiteers, producers and traitors to the Fatherland starve out our people.’85

  The working classes were similarly antagonized, but far less united than the bourgeoisie. Older divisions of gender and skill differentials remained, but workers were further divided by new wartime distinctions, most especially between industrial sectors and the official ration categories. The high earnings of armaments workers could cause resentment among both the middle classes and labourers in other industries. What really rankled, however, were their large rations. Initially, Germany’s ‘heaviest workers’ were granted supplements far in excess of what was actually necessary to compensate for their exertion: they were reckoned to burn almost 800 calories more than other workers, yet they daily received up to 2,000 calories extra. Widespread anger, not least among female munitions workers who were employed alongside male ‘heaviest worker’ colleagues but ineligible for their supplements, prompted the authorities in 1917 to flatten the differentials nationally and grant whole factories, rather than just certain workers, a new, less generous supplement.86 German armaments workers, with their higher rations and access to factory canteens well stocked with illegal food, were privileged compared with the rest of the Reich’s population and with their impoverished and tightly controlled colleagues in Austria. However, this did not deter them too from cursing a class of wealthy war profiteers. To a great extent this group was imaginary. Firms in the metals, machinery and chemicals sectors did substantially increase profits in the second half of the war, as a result of Hindenburg’s rearmament drive. Yet overall, the war industries’ profits sank to 82 per cent of their peacetime level. Mining did especially badly, with profits declining to just 39 per cent of their pre-war level in 1917. Despite the suspicions of German industrial workers, the war was not fought just at the expense of the poor. Wealth was not redistributed to the rich. Instead, the whole population paid.87

  German and Austro-Hungarian societies did not simply split along class lines; instead they fragmented in much more chaotic and fundamental ways. At the level of everyday interaction, basic sociability was lost. Hunger brought out the worst in people, encouraging irritability, impatience, paranoia and envy. In marketplaces, growing antagonism between shoppers and salespeople was one manifestation. Consumers suspected merchants, just as they did farmers, of creating artificial shortages by hoarding supplies until prices increased. They believed, often correctly, that they were being cheated: milk was diluted with water, the best cuts of meat were reserved for favoured customers. In Vienna, around 320 traders were charged every week with exceeding official prices. The press stoked the anger, publishing reports of the latest tricks of tradesmen to rob the consumer:

  A typical case of the chain selling scam has been . . . discovered in Frankfurt am Main. An out-of-town factory delivered a large quantity of artificial honey for 38 pfennigs per pound to a wholesaler there. The agent passed them onto another agent for 58 pfennigs, and he sold it on for 75 pfennigs to a travelling salesman. He charged a small dealer 80 pfennigs, while the consumer finally got the article for 1 mark. The filing of charges has ensured that the work of these gentlemen, who have made the Fatherland into a den of thieves, has been halted.88

  There were also bitter complaints about the rudeness of shopkeepers. With so many people wanting to buy, good customer service became superfluous. Dealing daily with tired, hungry and unruly shoppers constantly complaining about the cost and inferiority of the goods on sale also required a saintly level of patience that not everybody possessed. Some vendors lost their tempers: ‘you should spread shit on your bread’ one Berlin butcher screamed at a crowd criticizing the high price of his lard. With frayed nerves and short tempers on all sides, such abuse risked provoking violence. Already in October 1915, Berlin’s first butter riots were attributed by police in part to curt and insulting behaviour by salespeople towards their clientele.89

  Crime rates offer an index of societal cohesion. In the war’s first two years, crime dropped (see Fig. 5). German police statistics (Austrian ones are patchy and less reliable) record that it had almost halved from its pre-war rate by 1915. While the drafting of millions of men into the army was the main cause of the fall, the wave of communal solidarity that swept the country in these years probably also contributed, for female rates dropped 12 per cent in 1914 despite the hardship at war’s outbreak and in 1915 reached their lowest rate since records began. However, crime rose in the second half of the conflict, as deprivation and desperation grew and people became increasingly disillusioned with a state that neither kept up its side of the Burgfrieden contract nor obeyed its own laws. Fraud became endemic: checks in December 1916 found that the people registered to draw rations in Germany actually outnumbered the country’s population. There was a brisk trade in forged coupons. Men committed the majority of crimes, even though so many had left for army service. However, the female crime rate increased rapidly from 1916, peaking at a third above its peacetime level in 1918. Crimes against property accounted for most of the rise, and, with 72,974 women convicted, made up nearly a quarter of all female offences by 1917. Also notable was an increase in threats and assaults on officials. Some 1,224 women, most married and between thirty and sixty years old, were found guilty of this offence in 1916. While male criminologists, in line with fashionable theories of the day, worried earnestly that wartime disturbances in the female sex drive might be contributing to this theft and disorder, even they were ready to admit that women’s frustrations might also be a consequence of immense hardship and the greater but ineffectual interventions of officialdom into wartime life.90

  Figure 5. Crime in Germany, 1913–18

  Source: M. Liepmann, Krieg und Kriminalität in Deutschland (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig and New Haven, CT, 1930), pp. 15, 56, 98 and 134.

  The rise in youth crime was even more spectacular. Convictions of those under eighteen doubled in Germany between 1914 and 1918. The same was true in Austria’s capital. The increase was not simply a consequence of the shortages, for after a drop in 1914, German juvenile convictions rose around 7,000 over the last full year of peace to 63,126 in 1915. The following year, there were an additional 17,000 extra cases, and then a further 15,000, making a total of 95,651 youth convictions in 1917.91 The crime rate of boys was consistently six or seven times greater than that of girls, in part bec
ause the older ones went out to work while their female peers were stuck at home. Inadequate adult oversight encouraged delinquency among younger children. The call-up of over a third of German fathers, and probably a similar proportion in Austria-Hungary, removed strict paternal influence from households. Many mothers, working long hours in factories or fields or struggling to locate food, had little time and energy to watch over their offspring. Even after some armaments factories introduced limited day-care provision in 1918, one in seven mothers working in the south German war industry still had no choice but to leave her children home alone. Schools also provided less and less help. From the spring of 1915, they were open only for half or a third of the day because conscripted teachers could not be replaced and classrooms had been requisitioned by the military. In winter, they frequently closed completely due to a lack of heating fuel. Children thus had opportunities to steal or make nuisances of themselves and, especially once the severe shortages set in from 1916, a very strong motive. Truancy snowballed from the turnip winter, in part encouraged by stressed parents who now needed their children at home to cook or look after younger siblings while they queued or worked for food. Others, abandoned by the adult world, formed gangs with fantasy names like ‘The Black Hand’ or ‘The Apaches’ and thieved from bread wagons or coal yards to survive.92