[photo: FAMILY MEAL, mostly of potatoes.]
The first postwar Christmas, dismal though it was, was not quite as bad as it might have been. The worst specimen of a goose for the holiday dinner cost at least a thousand Reichsmarks, when one could be had at all; and one black marketeer made a huge profit selling cans of old Wehrmacht sauerkraut relabeled goulash. The Frankfurter Rundschau described the scene in that city:
A few stalls stand on the wet pavement of the main square in the midst of the ruins. Cards are for sale, also a few red and blue pencils, some cardboard toys, a few pitiful things made out of wood, and lots of trashy and expensive ornaments. The old Frankfurter Santa Claus and his arks full of wooden animals is distant as a dream.
In Stuttgart, the Christmas selection consisted mostly of small and expensive wooden toys and small quantities of powder, lipstick, and oilless face creams. A lighted Christmas tree atop the Stuttgarter Zeitung building, the first seen in the city since 1938, stood out painfully amidst the dark ruins.15 The weather, however, was warm and springlike. The Frankfurter Rundschau reminded its readers what such weather meant in terms of survival and recalled also that the previous year had been different in two respects: the weather on 24 December had been cold and the sky clear, and a hail of bombs had fallen on the city. This year at least "no mother needs to pick up her child in haste and run to the cellar with it."
The holiday was, in fact, not completely barren. Third Army reported "a certain aura of good feeling" associated with the season, and the food offices released extra rations of sugar and flour. Throughout the zone, the troops gave Christmas parties for children. In Landkreis Wetzlar, for example, the local detachment and the occupation troops gave a bag of cookies and a candy bar to each of the several thousand school children. In Bad Aibling the officers and men of the guard for Prisoner of War Enclosure No. 26 distributed chocolate and candy in the town schools. In Heilbronn, the US soldiers furnished candy, the prisoners of war in the local stockade contributed handmade toys, and the military government detachment recorded with satisfaction "the presence of a traditional Christmas tree in even the humblest cellar home." Some detachments noted, however, that the Germans who came around to them with holiday greetings were often small-time Nazis hoping to ingratiate themselves, while those who had nothing to fear or nothing to gain stayed away.
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