The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

material, yet Hilda thought little of it. As far as she was concerned, the
Nazis had brought employment and prosperity. There were great
celebrations too; Hilda had taken part in the opening ceremony of the Berlin
Olympics in 1936, and had enjoyed the festivities to mark the 700th
anniversary of Berlin in 1937. The following year there were the ‘Happy
Folk’ celebrations, then in June 1939 there had been a festival to mark the
summer solstice. The Nazis liked such public celebrations.
Yet there was also no doubting that a lot of the gaiety had gone out of
life since the beginning of the war. From the outset, there were nightly
blackouts, for example. Cafés, bars and dance halls were no longer allowed
to remain open all night either. For someone like Hilda who loved dancing,
this was a great blow. At night, the lights had all gone out and Berlin had
become a place of darkness. During her year’s service with the RAD, Hilda
had been helping in the house of well-to-do Nazi members, looking after
their children. They had a number of rehearsals for air raids, despite
Göring’s repeated assurances that no enemy bombers would fly over
German air space. ‘I would practise taking the children down to the cellar,’
says Hilda. ‘We always had to have a pail of water in the cellar in case of
fire.’ Gas masks were also issued.
There was rationing, too, introduced the previous August, and it was far
more stringent than it was in Britain. Each person was issued with colourcoded
ration cards – such as a red one for bread – which were valid for
twenty-eight days. This meant the authorities could alter the amounts
rationed at short notice. Bread, cereals, meat, fats, butter, cheese, milk,
sugar, and eggs were all rationed from the outset of war, and the amounts
permitted depended on age and the kind of work someone did. Clothing was
also rationed, with further different coloured cards – brown for teenage
girls, for example, and yellow for men. Germany’s lack of resources had a
big impact on the amount of clothes available. ‘The truth is,’ noted William
Shirer, ‘that having no cotton and almost no wool, the German people must
get along with what clothing they have until the end of the war.’ A great
deal of what they did have was devoted to making incredibly elaborate and
over-tailored uniforms for the armed forces; there was nothing like the
simple and spare British battledress in the Wehrmacht.
Rationing was relaxed over Christmas – everyone was given an extra
quarter-pound of butter, a hundred grams of meat and four eggs – but many
of the shops were tantalizing, displaying wonderful pre-war goods that were