Beginning of the war

When the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland in the early hours of 1 September 1939 without prior declaration of war – contrary to what was claimed by the German propaganda machinery – this was not a spontaneous response to Polish border violations but the beginning of a conquest that had been planned for a long time. This is also proven by the meticulous preparations for war, e.g. with regard to supply, air raid protection or surveillance activities by the Gestapo that were launched a long time before the beginning of the war. Another example is the fact that the auxiliary staff in charge of distributing ration cards and food stamps were already informed on 23 July 1939 to start their service on 28August 1939, i.e. four days before the beginning of the war allegedly provoked by the opponents.

Propaganda and reality

During World War II, the NS propaganda machinery was going at full blast. Initially, announcements of success and then later, with the war progressing and especially after the turn of the war at Stalingrad in early 1943, exhortations to hold out were the focus of propaganda activities. Reality, however, looked completely different – especially in Cologne, as the town suffered from severe air raids. The initial euphoria or at least carefreeness was soon replaced by terror from the air raids. Cologne alone was the target of 262 allied air raids in the course of World War II, which caused an enormous amount of destruction. Towards the end of the war, almost the entire centre of the town was razed to the ground and the historical architecture, which had been so diverse before 1939, was destroyed. The aerial warfare, which escalated after the ‘1000 bombers attack’ from 31 May 1942 and hit Cologne with particular strength in June/July 1943, in October 1944 and finally once more with full force on 2 March 1945, claimed the lives of approximately 20,000 Cologne civilians. The psychological impact of the events during the war as a whole and the constant confrontation with dying and death on the population are absolutely impossible to quantify.

Destruction – improvisation – homelessness.

After mid-1941 clearing up activities started to increasingly characterise the look of the streets and every-day life in the city. Regardless of whether they were officially organised and implemented by members of the auxiliary security service or based on private initiative – the mostly futile attempts to restore living space and infrastructure became a dominating element, whereas the constant propagandist appeal to improvise started to look increasingly hopeless given the surge of allied attacks. Naturally, the destructions were accompanied by homelessness. Already after the ‘1000 bombers’ attack on 31 May 1942, the number of people who had lost their homes was estimated at 60,000 to 100,000; the official numbers rose to 280,000 after the heavy wave of attacks in late June / beginning of July 1943. Specific numbers for the time after the devastating attacks in October 1944 are no longer available.

Supply

At the beginning of the war the long-prepared rationing of food started, followed by the rationing of more and more consumer goods. Cologne was covered by a network of district branches to coordinate the complicated procedure of local distribution. For almost everything ration cards were introduced during the war, even though fewer and fewer goods were available in exchange for them. However, despite the elaborate procedures constantly rendered even more complicated by the impact of the bombing raids, the NS regime spared no efforts to racially discriminate against certain demographic groups. After the beginning of the war, the Jewish citizens of Cologne all had to go to one single district branch of the food authority to pick up their ration cards – an increasingly arduous task given the exacerbating traffic situation because of the war and other restrictions against the Jewish population. Additionally, the cards were marked with a ‘J’.

Apart from the ration card system, ‘communal feeding’ became a more and more important component of daily life and survival in the course of the war. After the ‘1000 bombers’ attack from 31 May 1942, the ‘Social Welfare Office for Air Raid Victims’ was established. One of its core tasks consisted in providing the required food rations to the Cologne citizens who had lost their homes in bomb raids. A brisk black market developed, but only people with sufficient cash or popular bartering objects could benefit from it.

Despite all bottlenecks caused by the war, the NS regime always strove to keeping supply of the population at a high level in order to prevent riots and revolts like during World War I. To this end, also the possessions of the emigrated or deported Jewish population of Cologne and Europe were seized. After the ‘1000 bombers attack’, e.g., the furnishings of hundreds of flats including furniture and household goods from occupied Belgium or the Netherlands were brought to Cologne on boats.

Air raid protection

The Cologne population had to learn soon that staying in the air raid shelters – limited as they were to begin with – did not exactly offer safety. Despite all propagandist assurance concerning the ideal conditions of the air raid protection measures, a good portion of victims of the bomb war died in such air raid shelters, which often were poorly designed.

Beyond mere protection measures, the NS propaganda also attempted to encourage active air raid protection measures, where women were assigned increasingly important roles also officially. Like in the case of supply, also air raid protection was subject to officially imposed racially motivated discrimination which meant that the Jewish population and also, later on, most of the forced labourers were not allowed to seek refuge in public air raid shelters.

The economy

Also the Cologne industry swiftly adapted to the war economy. This did not only affect production as such, which was changed to meet armament demands in many companies, but also corporate policy in general, which now aimed at increased performance. As the war went on, this also applied during air raid warnings and after air raids.

However, repeated Wehrmacht draft waves and the parallel ‘combing campaigns’ started to have a sustained impact on staff structures, soon. Women, for example, were made to work in the arms industry based on ‘compulsory service’ obligations. Correspondingly, motivation was very low, which resulted in missed work time and ‘absenteeism’ of female employees and youths.

In order to maintain motivation at a high level despite the problems caused by the war, any suspicion of ‘slack’ or ‘refusal to work’ was closely observed and pursued in the companies, publicly denounced and also punished in many cases. From 1941 onwards, the Cologne Gestapo was authorised to transfer workers suspected to be ‘slackers’ to Gestapo-operated ‘work education camps’. After a few weeks of internment, characterised by physical labour, terror by the guard staff and hunger, the prisoners were released back to their original workplaces. In August 1943 alone, the Cologne Gestapo arrested at least 1,713 persons based on their ‘refusal to work’, among them 884 ‘Eastern Workers’, 222 Belgians, 219 French citizens, 123 Poles and 53 Germans.

‘Front ’ and ‘home front ’

With the beginning of the war, all private relationships and living conditions changed. Families were torn apart by draft, service obligations, war aid, sending children to rural areas or evacuation. The longer the war went on, the more ‘home’ was affected by and involved in the war - fare. Home was where production for the war took place and from here, the soldiers received moral support, too. This task was mainly to be performed by the women. They became the central hub of the family while the family was held together via letters and during home leave. This private communication especially grants deep insight into war experiences people had in Cologne and beyond. This includes facing destruction and death during air raids as well as participation in the destructive and violent Wehrmacht advance towards the East and the West. This also covers the knowledge of complicity or participation in crimes – be it in Cologne or in the occupied countries – even if they were hushed up, played down or only spoken about among friends and family after 1945.

The beginning of the war represented a rupture for those who were excluded from the emerging ‘home front’ based on racist and political reasons. Persecution escalated once more; there was basically no longer any hope to escape to another country. Also the people who successfully emigrated were now once more in danger of life and limb from the advancing German troops. They had to go underground to escape displacement or deportation.

Participation in the war and war captivity

At a census in March 1939, 772,221 people were registered in Cologne. Almost all male citizens born between the 1880’s and the 1920’s and ‘worthy of doing military service’ were to perform their service at paramilitary or military institutions, i.e. the Hitler Youth or the Reich Labour Service, the Security and Aid Service, as part of the Todt organisation, the People’s Storm, the Wehrmacht or the SS. About 100,000 Cologne citizens served in the Wehrmacht. Until 1951, the Cologne Welfare Office registered 78,390 German prisoners of war returning from captivity. More than half of them (42,654) returned in 1945, another 16,585 returned in 1946. About 60,000 (76 per cent) returned from American or British captivity, 11,340 (14.5 per cent) from Soviet captivity. In 1953, the Statistical Office listed 17,000 ‘Wehrmacht casualties’, another 12,000 were still missing or considered to be in captivity.

Cologne Police battalions

As of the mid-1930’s ‘Police Training Battalions’ were set up in Cologne and other cities, which turned into Police Battalions after the beginning of the war. The battalions 309 and 319 as well as the reserve battalions 66, 68 and 69 were stationed in Cologne.

The police units played a major role in the suppression of the people living in the areas occupied by the Germans and were strongly involved in the killing of the Jews who lived there. This was true for the Netherlands as well as for the occupied areas in Eastern Europe. Research on this is still in its beginnings. Initial estimations suggest that at least 6,000 Jews were murdered with the direct involvement of police stationed in Cologne.

The murders committed by members of battalion 309 in Bialystok in Northern Poland on 27 June 1941 are considered a particularly cruel example. On that day, they murdered over 2,000 people, 800 of whom were burned alive in the synagogue.

Youth during the war

The life situation for youths changed fundamentally during the war. Fathers and older brothers were drafted, mothers had to perform compulsory service, school was cancelled more and more often, flats and the home environment were destroyed during bomb raids, and then there was the direct confrontation with death. In order to curb the danger of neglect in view of the escalating war, the Welfare Office, the courts and the Gestapo as well as the Reich Youth Leadership and the Hitler Youth tried to keep the youths under control. Deviant behaviour of youths was pursued relentlessly.

War and war aid ser vices

Already from the beginning of the war, children and youths were drafted to perform various aid services such as harvesting or various collections (scrap material, herbs). When the bomb raids began, more and more members of the Hitler Youth were used as messengers or in the Hitler Youth fire brigades. From February 1943 on, also 17 year-old and then soon 16 year-old boys were deployed as Air Force Helpers (LWH). Also as a result of their years of military and ideological preparation, many LWH were very enthusiastic about the idea of participating in active combat and sometimes single-handedly operated entire anti-aircraft batteries. Many of them paid for it with their lives.

In order to prepare them for the war, youths spent three weeks at ‘military training camps’ from 1942 onwards; in September 1944, ‘Reich Youth Leader’ Artur Axmann ordered ‘total war involvement of the Hitler Youth’. For Cologne youths, this mostly meant deployment in the West: Boys born between 1929 and 1932 were ordered to take part in the ‘Siegfried Line construction effort’ at the German Western border. Female youths could also be sent there to perform kitchen services. In mostly unplanned marches, the youths were ordered to places of action where they rarely found accommodation or tools. Based on the chaos and the front being dangerously close, many of them decided to return to Cologne and to hide in rubble and debris.

Sending children to rural areas

In the autumn of 1940, when the allied bomb raids started to become more frequent, the decision was taken to establish the ‘extended evacuation of children to rural areas’ (KLV – Kinderlandverschickung) in order to take children and youths to safety away from the urban centres. The first evacuations from Cologne started in January 1941. At the KLV camps, the leaders of the Reich Youth seized the opportunity to extend the influence of the Hitler Youth at the expense of the statutory school authority. Consequently, KLV always had two faces: On the one hand, there was the aspect of recreation in areas away from the targets of the bomb raids that was emphasized by the local propaganda, then there was the massive ideological influence away from home and church as well as the para-military games to prepare for later war deployment.

Edelweiss Pirates

A quite significant portion of Cologne youths refused to be ordered into service for the ‘total war’. During their hikes on the weekends and while making music and singing together, they enjoyed a free life for brief periods – without alarms and air raids, provided they were not ambushed the Hitler Youth patrols or the Gestapo. These non-conforming youths were referred to as Edelweiss Pirates by the Gestapo, probably based on one of their typical symbols – a name that soon was widely used.

However, the great majority of Edelweiss Pirates did not consider themselves resistance fighters, they merely claimed a bit of self-determination and freedom. The Hitler Youth and the Gestapo considered them a threat and they were put under surveillance and persecuted accordingly. Nonetheless, these non-conforming youths stuck to their lifestyle. Only when the war escalated one last time in late 1944, the groups started to disintegrate.

Illegality and terror in Cologne-Ehrenfeld

During the last months of the war, very different people met in the ruins of Cologne who had one thing in common: They had gone underground, they lived clandestine, illegal lives and would do anything to ensure their survival. Among them, there were many forced labourers, deserters and youths who had defected from the Siegfried Line. Also dealers of stolen goods and black market peddlers hid in the ruins.

Under these circumstances, in autumn 1944, a group centred around an escaped concentration camp detainee named Hans Steinbrück, nicknamed ‘Bomb Hans’ because he was very skilled at defusing duds and held a lot of fascination especially for youths. Such loose groups were persecuted with unparalleled brutality. In Ehrenfeld alone, the Gestapo arrested 128 persons, 24 of which were publicly hanged without trial on 25 October and 10 November, respectively. At the first execution, the victims were eleven foreign forced labourers; on 10 November they were 13 ‘Germans from the Reich’ who were attributed to the group around Hans Steinbrück. Among them, there were also six youths, some of whom were former Edelweiss Pirates.