World War II classroom

I have two questions: What would the diet of an evacuated child consist of if they were not too well off and what would a naval officer patrolling the Dover waters and during Dunkirk?

Just brainstorming an idea at the moment so I will be as specific as I can! What was the general attitude toward pregnant Jewish women in Europe during WW2? What was the Nazi party/Gestapo/SS view? The non-Jewish German citizen? What about other Jewish people? Were they viewed especially negatively or was there anything special about their situation? Was there a significant drop in Jewish birth rates in the 1930's? And if she was taken by the Gestapo, would a pregnant woman typically be executed simply for being pregnant?

This is more like 10 questions I know, but I'm just trying to get the most basic information down right now, so anything would help!

Question- what evidence is there that Roosevelt, if any evidence, that he knew about Pearl Harbor ahead of time (which I don't belive.)

In mid 1941 the German economy was still working pretty normally, and the effects of attacking Russia had yet to be seen. Because of that, the French economy was still working pretty well too. In occupied France, things wouldn't have changed all that much from pre-war times. Germans did raid the country's stock of wines, and the drafting of forced laborers was beginning, but for the most part the French just continued on.

There was some dislocation as the ports were being rebuilt into military bases, and along the border with Germany the construction of the Siegfried Line...aka the West Wall...was underway, but French agriculture remained pretty much "uncontrolled" and crops were grown and sold as before. The German occupation was largely centered along the channel and in the larger cities, although local officials in villages were responsible for enforcing "German laws."

At that time, the Jews were largely being left alone although some local officials were working on deportations at that time.

So...food would be largely the same as before, with limited rationing in effect. The further away from the cities you get, the more that would be true. Paris might have rationed things where a farming village would operate in "subsistence mode" much as they did before, growing their own food and trading it back and forth amongst the residents.

In 1941 situation in most western countries was still pretty okay. There was rationing (I have Dutch woman's magazines from 1939, 1940 and 1941. The Germans prohibited household magazines in December 1941 and the first edition after that was in May 1946, I have that issue too) but on the whole, as long as you didn't need a dozen eggs for a recipe, you could still be fine food-wise. It only got worse in 1944 and 1945 really, when the whole war began to go pear-shaped for Germany.

Ah, a relatively easy one.

Prior to the start of the war, most (more then 50%) people living in cities learned to drive to some degree. Car ownership was still low, but driving skills were sometimes required for work, unrelated to driving your own car. As the military became more and more motorized, soldiers also learned. However, remember that the Wehrmacht was not highly mechanized and horses were still in common use, just not as "cavalry" animals.

There were horse-drawn artillery units right up to the end, and horse transport was not remotely rare. The troops at Stalingrad were largely horse-mobile beyond walking, and only tanks and some trucks were in use otherwise.

In the more rural areas, driving was not common and horses were still the primary conveyance for many. In the smaller villages, an automobile might be a real rarity. Hitler built the autobahns, but most people would never use them. He also created the "lay away" program for early Volkswagens...literally the People's Car...but they were never delivered to the people. There were some built, and they ended up being military vehicles.

Sometime around early 1943, as a part of the Total War program, all civilian cars were put into storage. Their batteries and tires were taken for war needs, and nobody could purchase gas anyway. In the cities that wasn't a big problem mainly because there was a pretty good public transit system until the bombing raids destroyed it. In the rural areas, people reverted to horses...or had never left them, and life pretty much went on.

The Americans "captured" many very good automobiles, most in great shape and lightly used during their advance into Germany proper. The Russians probably did to, but simply destroyed them since they largely relied upon trucks supplied by the Americans (oddly, mostly Studebakers) and their troops traveled by cart using horses or whatever was available. There's a great story, most likely accurate, of a squad doing into battle by hopping off their ox cart and charging the line.

In short, your general idea is quite likely, and not a stretch.

I don't have a direct figure, but this table is for 1939.

Population in ( millions) Motor Vehicles in (millions) P:MV*
France 42.0 1.8 23.3:1
Germany 75.0 2.0 37.5:1
Great Britain 48.0 1.5 32.0:1
Italy 39.0 0.3 130.0:1
United States 132.0 30.0 4.4:1

The British Army managed to have a totally motorised army in France in 1940. The French Army had more motor vehicles than the German Army. But the Germans concentrated what they did have.

The British Army got a lot of vehicles from American sources during the war, and had the chance to train drivers in 1942 and 1943. But it was really only during the war that British farmers stopped using horses. Fuel oil needed less shipping space than the food which might have been grown on the land needed to feed horses.

These figures are for all motor vehicles.

Check this out, a driver's award:

Somehow that sounds exactly like what the Soviets would do. They were, amongst other things, very conscious of rank and status.

Welcome to the classroom, and thanks for volunteering your assistance. The greatest problem with the Holocaust is that people fail to understand the shift that took place around 1900, when religious antisemitism morphed into racial antisemitism. While the difference might appear to be subtle, the fact is that it changed Everything from that point forward and led directly to the Final Solution.

Glad to have you aboard.

Sophia...after the war I understand there was a repatriation of children kidnapped or part of the Lebensborn Program. Would a child moved from Norway to Germany, fathered by a German soldier, be returned to the natural mother in Norway after being raised by a German family? What sort of paper work would the child have? Would she have faked documents.? (My heroine is searching for her unknown Norsegian roots but has very few leads...........I would like her to find some old documents giving clues to her background.

Thanks for joining us. Welcome.

Welcome. Glad you joined us. Sometimes we even have cookies.

*high fives Battle of Britain research* Can also help with this :DDD

I might need your help Kirsten. My novel is set in the Eastern Part of the Netherlands starting at August 1941 and I get frequently stumped by the most common things like what would the have for kitchen appliances, how would they name this and that. Ect.

The 'everyday' French person would not have driven cars, unlike (possibly) the US, cars were not common for ordinary working people to have till the 1960s.

http://www.peugeot.com/en/history/a-century-of-models/1940-1950.aspx
http://www.ehow.com/info_10008687_mini-cars-1940s-1950s.html

From what I've seen, it was sort of a way of recognizing someone who had useful abilities but wasn't considered leader material. The way I see it, it was a rank that showed you were valuable to your outfit but weren't commanding.

in a general sense, a T rating involved non-combat positions. Think of the interpreter in Saving Private Ryan. He has a T rating, because of his linguist skills, but he's clearly not a combat soldier. Mechanics, Cooks, and a bunch of other MOS were the same, and to some degree, still are. A SGT in the motor pool may be a very capable leader within his skill set, but utterly useless carrying a rifle. T isn't a measure of leadership, it's a mark that means "focused on a specific (usually non-combat) specialty.

"A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century" by Ben Shephard is a very good source. It covers PTSD treatments, psychiatric hospitals and medical theories in the first half of 20th century extensively, chiefly British and American sides.

Depending upon your time frame, be very careful using PTSD as a term. It was not in common usage prior to Vietnam, and not even quite then. "Combat Fatigue" and other similar terms were in use, even if they, more or less, described the same set of symptoms.

The answer depends upon where you are. In the cities, such as Paris, there were troops stationed there, and in some cases a fairly large contingent from the Gestapo. In the countryside, much less so, and some French farmers in rural areas might not see a German for months. The civilian authorities were often co-opted and served as proxies, willingly applying German policies and "enjoying" their new-found authority to basically brutalize the civilian population. However, that varied widely from place to place.

The second question (sorry, I missed it in the first reading)....

While Paris was a very progressive and permissive city in the 20's...one of the three great "sin cities" it was much less so when the war began. Most homosexuality either went underground or was driven there. A lot of the "artists" and others took off for other places. French society became much more straight-laced. There are a few cases of people being sent to the camps wearing the pink triangle, but those were exceptions for the most part. Later in the war, the occupation forces went after the Jews, and would sweep up what else they found, but it wasn't a concerted effort.

I can only accurately give a partial answer. Hopefully others can join in.

For the most part, occupied countries were left alone socially unless it directly impinged upon something the Nazis wanted. In short, life pretty much "just went on."

However, that said, some music was banned, and if it was played it went underground. American Jazz, which was (sorry for the terms but they're accurate) was described as "N**** Kike music." Public performance would have been banned, which is not to say it didn't happen. Private playing of phonograph records likely wouldn't be noticed.

The enforcement of that sort of thing was very uneven. It depended upon the enthusiasm of the local Nazi leadership or Gestapo. So, in one town it might be "tolerated" while in another it might be squashed. Bigger cities, ironically, were more regulated, simply because there were more German officials about. However, it is also true that bigger cities had more places to hide stuff.

Typical punishment might be closing a place...or breaking it up. Musicians might be arrested, and punishment was anything from being severely beaten all the way up to bodies dumped in a canal. Holland was somewhat similar to Denmark in that the civilian population was, more or less, uniformly hostile to the occupiers but just carried on by trying to ignore them as much as possible. True collaborators were limited in numbers.

Assuming you want all this to happen, there are easy ways to work around the confusion.

First, you're correct that records like that, and even the officialdom required to create and keep them, was a complete disaster in the immediate post-war period. Frankly, the Russians didn't much care. Germans probably did, simply because they are completely fascinated with keeping records. Oh well.

Now, your Ostarbeiterin would likely have been "discovered" eventually, and, as you observe, marked for "repatriation" when the forced resettlement occurred. So, what to do.

First, I'd suggest that your characters attempt to get it official, and are told "come back some other time...we don't much care...we've got other things to worry about...buzz off!" They might be able to find some remaining local official or Pfarrar who would perform the service if they really really wanted one. Otherwise, they just move in together and carry on.

Second, I'd suggest she "lose her card" in the final days of battle. "I left it at home and the shelling destroyed my flat" or "The whole block was burned down and I was lucky to get out alive." The story was real enough that people regularly told it and "got away with it." The first time this is likely to come up is when the Russians issued ration cards, so...she could easily present her "German" name and it would likely fly. Somebody might ask for a birth certificate or whatever, but her answer could be the same.

As long as her German language skills were adequate, they'd probably give her the card and move along. The only real danger would be that she couldn't come up with some plausible story about her background, so she'd need to make up a legend of some sort...where she was born, what she's been doing, and such. In the Russian Zone she's not going to be subject to the Fragenbogen, so she's off the hook for that, and most women were expected to fill one out anyway.

I think any remotely plausible ploy would work, both for your story and in real life. Things were "really confused" in that time.

Okay, some confusion I think.

There was no basis for internment of Germans prior to the US entering the war, which didn't happen until Pearl Harbor, so "internment" in the 1940's would be pretty hard to explain. It's possible some German citizens were held, but it would most likely be sailors who ended up in the US, possibly ship-wrecked, and they were held to comply with neutrality regulations.

There were some criminal prosecutions of the leadership in the American Nazi Party, and a few wonderful folks from the German-American Bund, but otherwise I'm not aware of anything specific. If you can tell me where you got that number, maybe I can dig in a different direction.

Post Pearl Harbor the ethnic Japanese living on the West Coast were internned, even if they were US citizens. It was, ultimately, deemed un-Constitutional, but that was long after the fact. German immigrants, even those who had arrived shortly before the war weren't generally bothered much, although there were exceptions. The obvious difference was that the Japanese were "racially different" and they perpetrated a "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor, which really raised emotions. The war with Germany, on the other hand, was much different, and, setting aside the "near state of war" in the Atlantic shipping lanes, nothing formal happened until Hitler actually declared war, and even then nothing happened on US soil. German-Americans enlisted in the military and were generally accepted without much to-do.

Since Germans were part of the great immigration era, many were actually born in the US and held citizenship. Others did not, but they were still allowed in the military...since most any warm body was welcome. There had been some very public and notable Germans who arrived in 1939, forced out by the Nazis, so people were aware that it wasn't "all Germans" involved in the war. Einstein and numerous scientists along with a bunch of artists, writers, and others were seen as victims of the German government.

This site has some basic info, although it's not the best. None of us in the German editors group has had the time to deal with it yet, but we'll get to it some day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-American_Bund

Thanks for joining us. I do the Pacific Theatre also, but I'm not as strong on things inside Japan. Appreciate you're being willing to help others.

Let's see.

While he could legally join when 17, it wasn't very common prior to the actual declaration of war in December, 1941. Possible, but you'll want to supply some reasoning...i.e. get away from a terrible home or something.

He might receive training as a sniper, but most likely only because he was a good shot to begin with. Snipers weren't much of a specialty prior to WWII in the US Army. Beyond that, he would typically be assigned to an infantry unit somewhere and hang around doing what peace-time Army guys do. Drill, practice, and be bored. He might, but wouldn't likely, be issued a "special rifle." In most cases, the troops around would know who the "best shot" was and rely on him in that way. Think of Shifty Powers from Band of Brothers.

Since he's in the Army, he can't be overseas in Europe prior to the declaration of war. There were a few units here and there in England, but they were not typically stock infantry units. Most of them were specialties...logistics, intelligence, and the like, and their only purpose was to co-ordinate with the British, mostly dealing with the war in the Atlantic.

You can find exact dates, but for the most part American troops didn't start heading to Europe until the Torch landings in North Africa, and those guys came directly from the US to Africa...no stop in England along the way. After Torch, Americans split up, some remaining to start the Sicily and Italian campaigns while others went to England for D-Day. Now you're into the 1943-44 era. You'd probably want to check an OrBat to see which units went where, and then back up to earlier times to see where the unit you need would have been stationed in the US.

If you want him to be a POW for a year, that means he's pretty much got to get captured right at D-Day. The easiest route for that would be for him to be in the 82nd or 101st, since they were spread all over during the D-Day drops and lots of them ended up captured. Assuming he wasn't seriously wounded, there's no real reason to believe he wouldn't survive. Canadians from the raid on Dieppe survived much longer. There were, of course, exceptions, so anything is possible. If you want him to survive, keep him in a pure POW camp and don't let him get transferred to a KL. There are numerous cases where Americans, usually in small numbers, ended up in KL for various and strange reasons, and many of them were killed at the end.

For treatment issues there are several sources. Most, unfortunately, are based upon the camps for RAF and USAAF personnel since they were often captured much earlier. You could read The Wooden Horse, or The Great Escape, or Escape from Colditz to get a sense of some of that, and there are many other books and web-sites that also deal with it. Google is your friend.

One last thought: Assuming he's actually deployed as a sniper, which was pretty rare, he wouldn't want to admit that to those who capture him. They wouldn't be impressed, and he'd be in for a rough time.

Focusing more on the PoW question:

From stories I have heard, prisoners in German camps were treated relatively well. You do have cases where Germans would massacre prisoners but these cases are rare. This was due to the fact that there were shared feelings of European decent. Germans [and Italians] saw themselves as very similar to the American troops [and vice versa].

Now, from first hand accounts I've encountered, ethnicity did have something to do with how well you were treated. A German-American in a German PoW camp was treated better especially if he could speak German. This connection made him seem more like the captors.

My Sources:
-The Deadly Brotherhood by John McManus
-First Hand Accounts

I've just been browsing personal accounts of American, British and Australian POWs here: http://pegasusarchive.org/pow/frames.htm

Lots of information on conditions in camps for Western POWs and their backgrounds prior to imprisonment.