eater director concerned himself with the children of the whole house and tried to raise their spirits in the terrible situation with little games. Of course as a theater director that is how he made his living. I never heard anything more about what became of this man.
There was another person who distributed the so-called ration cards. That was a person who had an important function in national socialist circles. With the ration card, one had control over the people. Who was held back in the city and who wasn’t. These cards weren’t handed out for a month, but for differing amounts of time. Sometimes for a week, sometimes for 12 days. Each time one had to check in with a clerk, Ms. Venske, and after that one received the ration card. My mother wanted to drive to Frankfurt am Oder with us children to see our grandparents, which was indeed encouraged by the government and the city administration, whoever was able should leave the city. Ms. Venske tried to prevent that by all means. She prohibited our departure several times by giving us the ration stamps one day later. She even said to my mother once, “Oh! You want to run away again and abandon the Fuehrer.” That’s the attitude that national socialists had toward others at that time.
Q: Was there hate toward the invaders? Did that break ground?
Of course there was hate toward the aggressors, particularly after 1943. I always have to mention that year, because the year 1943 took an intervening course in the question of the direction of the war. Not only had the bombers become stronger. The caliber of bombs and weapons had become stronger, and attempts to bring about destruction relied more heavily on incendiary bombs and fire than on explosive bombs of the traditional variety. These blazes also led to severe burns of people. I saw myself that people burned, and were covered with blankets and extinguished upon leaving the bunker on the way home, for example. This led to a situation where one was always prepared to believe that Germany could nevertheless win the war ultimately.
Q: So they bound together, as there was no alternative to perseverance, or how would you formulate that?
I would say, also from the perspective of my current experience, after one has not forgotten this whole thing so to speak and has reprocessed it, that the intensification of the bombing, which of course had the goal of weakening the morale of the German population, that these attacks, self-proclaimed by the British as terror attacks — I read that in directives, that is available to everyone today, one can look that up in any archive — did not lead to the destruction of morale, but rather precisely at this point the national socialist party, the NSDAP, approached the ordinary people and offered assistance, in that, after the bombing, they established emergency kitchens and saw about housing, so that the schism between the Volk, between the ordinary people, and the abhorrent national socialist fighters was not compounded.
Q: But were there expressions of hate, or of national socialist disposition toward the bombers?
Hatred toward the Allies from the populace, which expressed itself, as I later encountered, in the lynch mob of Rüsselsheim, I did not experience such incidents in my environment as a child here in Berlin. However, I did experience how, immediately following severe shelling, distraught people screamed, “This cursed war, when will this cursed war be over?” The so-called snitches and the absolute party supporters tolerated that in this situation, did not step in, and to put it simply, allowed nationalistic ideology to fade away.
Q: Did one differentiate between Britons and Americans? Between day and night attacks?
To answer that in one sentence, the Americans were given preference. That may be related to the fact that the British forces had been waging the war for longer, and only launched attacks at night. One had a different, more open-minded relationship with the American pilots than with the British. That fact demonstrated itself in 1945, as the American troops advanced into the area of