Housing had long been tight in Berlin, and it became considerably more so because of an influx of war bureaucrats and workers to man the arms factories. While the population increased by an estimated 25 percent, housing construction remained flat. Thus the legions of newcomers found it extremely difficult to find a single room, much less an apartment, in the overcrowded metropolis. Tex Fischer, an Associated Press correspondent, was forced to live in his office. Even the Crown Prince of Sweden, who showed up unannounced for a visit, was turned away by four big hotels before a fifth one found space for him. Of course, the problem would only become worse later in the war, as Allied bombs blew away more and more residences, and measures like expelling the Jews failed to provide sufficient
Even before the bombing raids became more effective, Berlin’s vaunted public transportation system began falling apart due to lack of spare parts and qualified repair personnel. One bus and tram line after another went out of service. The number of taxis was cut by four-fifths, and those that remained received less than a gallon of fuel a day.
Taxi drivers and repair men could charge whatever they wanted, but many preferred to be paid in goods rather than in cash, since there was a dearth of items in the stores to spend money on. Even the KaDeWe department store, Berlin’s premier consumer paradise, now offered little to tempt the buyer. After searching the store for two hours for something of use, a Berliner complained: “That big barn is empty. It is a feat of skill to get rid of fifty pfennigs on all seven floors.”
Given these developments, it is not surprising that some of the foreign correspondents in the German capital began to wonder about the Berliners’ staying power. Speculation in the foreign press that Berlin might not be able to hold up under sustained bombing infuriated Goebbels, since he shared that fear himself. He countered such talk with accounts of Berliner pluck, citing the case of “one simple man who, after working all night during an air raid, upon going home in the morning, found his home destroyed, his wife and five children dead. Not a word of complaint was forthcoming.” This of course left open the possibility that the man in question was too stupefied with grief to complain.
Pity or Regret Is Completely Out of Place Here
In the summer of 1940 there were still about 70,000 Jews in Berlin. Many of them were too old or poor to leave; others continued to hope that they could outlast the evil that had descended upon them. To Goebbels this was a provocation. As long as Jews lived in Berlin, he complained, the city’s atmosphere would be polluted. He 332 proposed that they be removed to Poland within a period of eight weeks. He also insisted that Berlin, as the capital, should get preference in the expulsion over other “Jew cities” like Breslau.
To illustrate the perniciousness of the Jewish influence, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry sponsored the production of a crudely anti-Semitic film,
Yet the majority of the Jews remaining in Berlin still failed to get the message— or, more accurately, continued to refuse to act on a message that was becoming clearer by the day. In the spring of 1941 the Jewish presence in the city had not diminished significantly despite all the intimidation and threats. Surveying the situation on March 20, 1941, Leopold Gutterer, Goebbels’s deputy, fumed that it was not right “that the capital of the National Socialist Reich should still harbor such a large number of Jews.” Goebbels himself, still pressing for a mass deportation to Poland, believed that Hitler would soon endorse such a “solution.” After all, he noted, Hitler’s master builder for Berlin, Speer, could certainly use the twenty thousand or so dwellings still occupied by Jews “as a reserve for those rendered homeless by greater bombing damage and later by demolition connected with the revamping of Berlin.”
