GERMANY

The early portion of World War II had a curiously bifurcated impact on internal affairs in the Third Reich. On the one hand, the desire of the government to avoid at all costs any repetition of the collapse at home which it believed responsible for the defeat of 1918 made the regime most reluctant to ask for too high a level of sacrifices. While rationing was introduced at the end of August, 1939, every effort was made to keep rations high; and, partly at the expense of looting most of the rest of Europe, German rations were the highest among the European belligerents until the last months of the war.

Similarly, there was no total mobilization of either the population or the material resources of the country. While millions of men served in the armed forces, there was a high level of deferments to work in industry and in the administration, a policy which did not change until early 1942 when the disastrous defeats in the East meant greater priority of the manpower needs of the armed forces over the political preferences of the government. Furthermore, within the realm of German industry, a high level of consumer goods production continued well into the war, so that neither industrial facilities nor raw materials were directed overwhelmingly into war production until 1942.

If Germany did not draw into military service all able-bodied men, the country was even less inclined to mobilize the labor potential of its women. In the first year of war, in fact, the relatively high level of support payments made to dependents of men in the military had the effect of leading many women to withdraw from employment in industry, offices, or shops—they could do better living at home on their allowance. Of those women who were gainfully employed outside the home, farm, or family enterprise, millions were working as maids for middle and upper class households well into the war. Only from 1943 on would this picture begin to change, but until the last stages of the war Germany did not draw its women in to the same extent as Britain and the Soviet Union did; by then the bombing had brought them into the war in a very different way.