German Home Front

More Letters from the German Home Front
(American Magazine, 1942)

“The information in letters found on the German dead, intimate and personal as it is, leads to some striking deductions. The people inside Germany hate the war and want it to end. They are tired of hardships, sick of sacrifice. They lament the moral disintegration of their young women; they shudder at air raids; they weep over their dead. But nowhere do they betray the least suggestion of German guilt or regret for horrors which the German armies perpetrate on conquered countries. Hard as is their life, they know neither starvation nor desperation. Nor do they expect Germany to lose the war. To expect them at this time to revolt against Hitler is as futile and puerile to expect the Fuehrer to live up to his promises or the treatise he signs.”

Berliners Under the Bombs
(Liberty Magazine, 1944)

A Turkish diplomat explains all that he saw in the war-weary Berlin of 1944:


“You see children wildly seeking for their mothers, wives wildly seeking for their husbands. Women carry dead children in their arms and children weep beside their dead mothers.

The Bombed-Out Germans
(Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

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…”

Misery in Berlin
(PM Tabloid, 1943)

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

The Bombed-Out Germans

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

Sticking It To Berlin
(Newsweek Magazine, 1943)

[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.

The German Resistance
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

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.

RAF Bombs Munich
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

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.

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