The importance of the cigarette trade is revealed in contemporary literature. Heinrich Böll’s ‘Kumpel mit den langen Haar’ (My Long-Haired Mate) describes a raid on a black market. The central character sees jeeps drive up to a station filled with redcaps who then cordon off the area and begin their search. ‘It went incredibly quickly. I stood just outside the cordon and lit a cigarette. Everything happened so quietly. Lots of cigarettes landed on the ground. Pity . . . I thought and I made an involuntary calculation as to how much money was now lying in the dirt. The Black Maria quickly filled up with its quarry . . .’ The man wisely avoids going to his digs. He goes into the station and walks to the buffet where he hands over 200 cigarettes to Fritz the waiter and sticks the money into his back pocket. ‘Now I was completely without wares, just a packet for myself.’ He orders a bowl of meat stock and a piece of bread. He is joined by little Mausbach, quite out of breath. “You,” he stammered. “You need to beat it . . . they have searched your room and found the coke . . . Christ!” He was almost choking. I patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and gave him twenty marks . . . Pity, I thought again . . . eight thousand marks gone up in smoke . . . You are safe nowhere.’3
One way of surviving was smuggling from the Russian Zone to the West. Libussa von Krockow traded American cigarettes in the Russian Zone and procured nylons in Chemnitz that she then bartered with a shoemaker in Holstein for a pair of shoes. She suspended the smuggling in 1946, with the onset of the killing winter.4 In the spring of 1947 Clay made a move to stop the use of cigarettes as currency by banning their importation. He considered bringing in tobacco instead, thereby leading to a fall in prices as supply increased. Clay had to admit it was unlikely to remove the value of Lucky Strikes, as there had been a black market for American cigarettes before the war.5 Rumours of currency reform were rife six months before the Allies made their move. Until that happened barter was still the means by which people normally lived. A woman wanting to have her hair washed, for example, had to bring with her the soap, a towel and five pieces of wood. Wood was an important commodity, especially in winter, and Ruth Friedrich was appalled to see that her lover’s grave had been plundered of the pine fronds she had laid on it - an ancient and probably heathen Prussian tradition.6
For the Allies working in Germany shopping was done in ‘Occupation Marks’ - ‘a currency with an appearance even more spurious than that of the million- and milliard-mark bills of the inflation period after the First War’.7 Cigarettes were one means the Allies had of getting their way in Germany; another was chewing gum. A generation of Germans became addicted to gum as a result of GIs handing it out to children, so much so that even now chewing gum is nowhere in Europe so respectable as it is in Germany. Even the Old Etonian Stern was not averse to using gum as a way to the hearts of children.8 Another important commodity was soap. Prisoners released from American camps hoarded soap, which they could sell for food or cigarettes. Former POWs from British camps had no such currency. A bar of soap had a monetary value of between fifty and eighty marks. The most highly prized was Palmolive.
In the winter of 1946-7, as many as 60,000 chiefly elderly Germans died of cold and hunger. CRALOG (Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany) was a manifestation of the Allies’ change of attitude to the Germans. By the beginning of 1947 it had distributed 30,000 tons of food. In April 1946 CARE (Co-operative of American Remittances to Europe) joined in. This was the beginning of the famous CARE packets: 1.9 million of them were handed out in 1946 alone. After the winter Clay called for relief from Washington. He expressed the view that there was no hope of introducing democracy to a starving population.9
In a Germany where there were ‘calories but no food’10 something always needed to be found to supplement the scanty commons provided by the Allies - and that meant the black market. ‘Whoever wanted to live needed to find connections to the black market as a seller or a buyer.’11 There was nothing new about black markets, which will emerge wherever there is rationing. The black market flourished during the Third Reich despite some draconian punishments, from the Junker who was made an example of and given four months for failing to deliver his milk to the co-operative, to the 5,142 black-marketeers who were executed for illicit trading.12
The black market was often based in the main railway station. In a remarkable number of instances, it was the only largely undamaged structure in the city centre. The atmosphere in these stations appears in Böll’s early stories. Another man with an eye for detail was Zuckmayer - although with an important proviso. Zuckmayer points out that recording the man in the street often gives a false idea of how a country thinks because the stupidest have the loudest mouths, and more intelligent people either reflect more before they speak or hold their tongues.13 The station was the point of arrival and departure and a transit point: ‘In Germany there is . . . a ceaseless creeping, crawling and groping; an enraged ant-heap, the constant buzzing of swarms of wild bees; an eternal coming and going, tramping, running and criss-crossing; a scraping and creaking of millions of unquiet soles. This is the spirit of the “Black Market” or the “Green Border” [the unpatrolled frontier]; the world and the march of the homeless, the expellees, the masses torn asunder, the furtive traveller, the marauding youth.’
Railway stations were the centres of their universe, open all day and all night. ‘Stations are not just miserable waiting rooms for overtired, exhausted travellers; they are homes for the homeless.’14 On the north side of Frankfurt Station there was a hut operated by the Red Cross that served as a room for travelling mothers, where they could change their infants and receive a little nourishment in the form of porridge, gruel, skimmed milk or hot soup. There was no need of coupons. Despairing mothers often left their children in the hut, knowing that the Red Cross could hardly toss them out into the cold. On the far side of the Rhine, in the French Zone, there was rumoured to be a market for babies.15
Zuckmayer clearly enjoyed the curious parade of figures in every conceivable costume: a man wearing Tyrolean dress, his knees exposed to the freezing air and frozen blue scratching his wiry beard with the side of his zither case; another wrapped in a Yugoslavian sheepskin; men dressed in every form of military uniform and a lot of black jackets emblazoned with the fading legend ‘PW’ for prisoner of war. Women were also dressed in this motley fashion, from a worn-out silk cape to a pair of ski trousers that had seen better days.
To buy food or drink required prolonged queuing. If you were lucky you might obtain a glass of watery beer or a cup of beef broth on presentation of a ration coupon. Even then a cup or glass was only issued on payment of a ten-mark deposit. Most were there to trade, however. Zuckmayer compared it to Times Square on a Saturday night. If you moved among the mass you could hear the offers of butter, dripping, flour, cigarettes - Chesterfields or Luckies were the best - or gems, coffee, chocolate or soap. Papers were also traded, often on particular specialised platforms within the station. New names could be issued with the passport. Most people went for quite banal things they felt they needed, like tobacco. For a box brownie you might have received a carton of washing powder crammed with desiccated tobacco or crumbled cigarettes made up from fag ends called Besen or brooms. An opera glass yielded a kilo of dried peas and a bacon rind. On another occasion a camera was hocked for a goose.16
There were periodic Razzien or raids, when the traders scattered before the police - these were either ‘minor’ or ‘major’ raids. The former were carried out by the German police, who took their work seriously. They concentrated on rounding up prostitutes and taking them off to a clinic for examination. They were released with a ‘hunting certificate’ - or a clean bill of health - and went directly back to the station. The major Razzia was performed by foreign MPs. Those who were arrested spent a night in the cells. In Berlin that meant the police station on the ‘Alex’ or Alexanderplatz. It was not considered a disgrace to be caught and punished in this way, when so many Germans were in prison for innocent reas
ons.17 Among those arrested was Ernst Jünger, who was in Tübingen to address students. One of his companions in the car was found to possess a suspicious number of cigarettes. He was put against a wall, and when the local Landrat intervened, the politician was made to join him.18
Some of the traders had already begun to cast themselves as ‘businessmen’ by the winter of 1946-7. One young man called Dieter took Zuckmayer off for a drink at his favourite bar, which turned out to be close to Frankfurt Station. They had to walk though a gloomy and ruinous backyard. The bar had been decorated with fake flowers and a three-man ensemble played pseudo-swing music. An evil schnapps was available for monstrous prices, as were American cigarettes. There was a sign on the counter announcing that the under-aged were not allowed in, but Zuckmayer saw plenty of much younger boys and girls. Zuckmayer heard a boy pleading with a girl to sleep with him. He could not have been older than fifteen and still had a child’s voice. The object of his attention was a powerful girl in a Manchester jacket and man’s trousers: ‘Will you not come with me tonight? You promised.’
‘Leave me alone. I have already done it five times today.’
‘But you promised!’ the boy begged.
‘Leave me alone. Do you think I do this for pleasure?’
‘I’ve got a Hershey Bar.’ The boy was almost in tears.
‘Get on with you. I still need a carton of cigarettes. I need a new dress.’
Zuckmayer’s ‘businessman’ did not relish the idea of this freebooting being brought to an end, but a money-based economy was bound to come. The other boys ‘in business’ looked well on it: they were strong and fit, although the girls, living mostly from their bodies, looked less so. There was chicanery there too. Some of the men who went into the ruins with the girls were promptly beaten up and relieved of their wallets.19 Dieter lived with a girl who worked as a prostitute for the officers and men of the garrison. He was keen that Zuckmayer should not think ill of her for making her money that way. She was all right for all that, and Dieter thought that they could make it together, pull themselves out of the gutter. ‘Who can navigate these times and remain wholly clean?’20
In Berlin the most famous black market was held around the ruined Reichstag building, stretching as far as the Brandenburg Gate - though this may have been a separate division. The main business was in cigarettes, and there were the usual police raids. One effect of the new currency was to increase the price of metal, and Paul Wallot’s building was stripped of all its metallic features for cash. This rang the knell for a number of statues that were torn down and sold for scrap.21 The legendary Munich black market was in the Möhlstrasse in Bogenhausen. Here you could obtain anything, provided you had money, cigarettes or something to swap: ‘flour and carpets, French cognac [sic], Spanish oranges, silver pots and cigarettes, English cloth and German cameras’. The traders were eastern Jews, Greeks, Hungarians, Czechs and Poles. There were also deals in the main Viktualienmarkt in the centre of the city, where business centred on the Stadt Kempten pub. Even the Hofbräuhaus was a black market in its day. Traders used ingenious devices to run cigarettes. There were James-Bond-style cars with false floors which could be lined with cartons.22
The situation in French-controlled south Baden gives an indication of values at the end of 1946: 1,200 litres of fermenting wine must plus 200 litres sweet must plus old wine barrels were exchanged for seven rubber tyres; 6,000 kilos of potatoes for twelve pairs of working trousers and four aprons; three flints for five eggs; six bottles of schnapps for three men’s shirts; a watch for two kilos of butter; thirty litres of wine for eighty horseradish roots; two pairs of ladies’ trousers for two calf pelts; a cuckoo clock with a ceramic plate for a thousand cigarettes; a 500-kilo pig for 200 litres of wine; two pairs of ladies’ socks for a pound and half of butter.23
There were plenty of rhymes:Der Schmuck hat man als Butter aufgegessen,
die Meissner Tassen trägt man jetzt als Schuh.
So wächst dem Eigner, was er einst besessen
Von Grund auf umgewandelt wieder zu . . .dd
Here at last was ‘zero hour’; the tabula rasa. Those family treasures that had not been destroyed by bombs, stolen or broken by Russians were now eaten up. That the black market had its positive side was pointed out by the Frankfurt city physician Dr Strüder: it offered an opportunity to supplement rations. Another - also illegal - solution was hamstern. Special trains took town and city folk out to country areas to trade with farmers and smallholders. If no one was to hand, the ‘hamsters’ helped themselves. The farmers did not trust money, so exchanges were in useful goods or objects. Another country activity of note was illegal distillation. A bottle of schnapps was a tradable commodity and a good way of turning a few apple trees into a money-making enterprise. Growers in Lower Austria fought shy of bringing their wine into Vienna, as they were often robbed by Russian soldiers. They preferred potential clients to come to them, at their own risk.24
Of course the black market bred crime as well. The buyer needed to beware of counterfeit foods. Tins were filled with filth, and the unwary could return to find everything they had acquired was rotten. Many of the Germans working at the black market were KZler - ‘greens’ or habitual criminals - and these were prone to show off their wealth in one or two prominent bars, such as the Queen in Cologne, by drinking real coffee and eating coupon-free menus. The fortunes of several West German businessmen were founded in the post-war black market.
The black market was also a stomping ground for DPs. While they waited to be repatriated many turned to crime. Western European DPs received a good press on the whole, but others were feared by the Germans. James Stern witnessed an ugly scene in Darmstadt, when the car he was in collided with a German cyclist with a wooden leg. A crowd of Polish DPs gathered around the injured man, evidently hoping that the Americans would beat him up - or worse. They were disappointed when they drove the man home instead. Wild bands of lawless DPs had become the new brigands of post-war Germany. Another man Stern interviewed, a lawyer, was obsessed with the risk of robbery by bands of Polish DPs. So far they had stolen three bicycles from him in a Munich suburb and a Pole had shot at him in the city centre. Russian DPs had attacked his neighbours and killed the wife, before stealing the couple’s bicycles.
As Jünger had observed in his village near Celle, the DPs were at their worst around Hanover. The writer and journalist Leonard Mosely admitted that most of the cars had been stolen by the Allies themselves, but it was DPs who first led a reign of terror in Herford ‘loaded with loot and drinks’. In Hanover they were out of control for several days.25 Touring Hessen in the winter of 1945, John Dos Passos was told of a German killed and stripped by DPs the night before. The DPs formed robber bands that were responsible for a number of atrocious acts in both Germany and Austria. Near Stuttgart there were nightly attacks on isolated farmhouses. On 10 November 1945 at Spitalmühle near Margröningen a miller and his family fled to the cellar for safety, but all six were shot in the head by the intruders.26 The American army was called in to deal with a gang of Polish DPs, and eventually had to use tanks in the course of a twelve-hour Razzia at Wildflecken near Fulda.27
For the time being no one seemed to have a policy for what to do with the foreign workers. They were to be found on the roads leading from the main cities, trying to find a way home. The exceptions were the Russians, most of whom would have done anything to remain in Germany, or travel on to America or Australia. Elena Skrjabina was appointed to visit some of the Russian camps. She reported that all the Russian inmates were ‘driven by one feeling - to get as far away as possible from the Soviet Union’.28
Russian soldiers sold off some of their surplus watches and traded German marks for dollars, while the Americans bought Meissen porcelain with their PX rations.29 A Russian soldier remembered encountering a black American who tried to sell him first a Colt pistol, then a jeep. Elsewhere blacks sold cigarettes, chocolates and soap.30 Smuggling cars back to the Soviet Union ended wh
en the Russian authorities imposed huge tariffs in 1946. The Americans used the Interzone train that ran from Osnabrück to Berlin and was called the ‘the silk-stocking express’ for that reason.31 The British received fifty cigarettes free per week and could buy another 200 at duty-free prices. These were sold for marks and then changed back into sterling at RM40 to the pound. Anything could be obtained on the black market to improve the quality of life. There were drugs such as cocaine, morphine and opium; for VD sufferers there was penicillin, and quinine to provoke abortions. There were also contraceptives. 32
One striking case of criminality that had its origins in the black market was that of Werner Gladow, the ‘Al Capone of the Alexanderplatz’. Gladow was born in May 1931, the son of a butcher. He was too young to have experienced the war as a soldier, merely the chaos and depravity occasioned by the Allied bombing. At sixteen he made a modest start as a criminal on the Berlin black market. He was rounded up and imprisoned twice. In April 1948 he graduated from petty marketeering to proper crime when he smashed the window of a camera shop in the Rankestrasse and stole what he thought was a camera. The proprietor gave chase, but Gladow shot him in the leg. He and his gang stole a car and headed for the Soviet Sector. When East Berlin Volkspolizei or ‘Vopos’ surrounded the car, Gladow fired at them and the gang escaped.
Gladow formed his friends into a proper gang expanding to twenty-seven at its apogee. All the members had nicknames. Gladow was ‘Doktorchen’, or ‘Little Doc’. He acted on tip-offs from Gustav Völpel, an executioner on both sides of Berlin between 1946 and 1948. The gang’s first proper haul occurred when they held up the cashier of a funfair on the Prenzlauer Berg. Gladow was convinced that the way to succeed was superior firepower. To this end he held up a detachment of seven Vopos and stole their guns. These came in useful for the robbery of a number of jewellers’ shops and a hold-up at a Tauschzentralde in the Frankfurter Allee. As the director of the Tauschzentral would not reveal where he had hidden the day’s takings Gladow tortured him until he handed over RM6,000. Meanwhile the gang had run out of ammunition. The solution was to hold up another eight Vopos in January 1949 and rob them of their guns. The Gladow gang’s attacks became ever more violent. During a robbery of a jeweller’s they shot a man several times. A shocked general public pelted them with stones. They still managed to escape and the police found no trace of them. One reason why they were so difficult to track down was the position of Berlin and its sectors. As in The Third Man in Vienna, there was no co-operation between the police in the East and West. Berlin was a paradise for gangsters like Gladow.
After the Reich Page 51