Part I

The German civilian experience of the First World War was one characterized by considerable shortcomings of consumables. Not only did luxury items like chocolate or tobacco disappear, but so too did essential foodstuffs like fats and meats. The long memory of civilian privation weighed very heavily on the leadership of the Third Reich. Although public rhetoric often stressed Germans' devotion to duty was greater than the desire for non-essential luxuries, there was a serious concern that there would be a repeat of the collapse of civilian morale in 1918. Thus the state sought to simultaneously ameliorate these shortages while simultaneously asserting Germans could do without them. The Third Reich adapted an overlapping three-prong strategy to provide consumer goods like tobacco and coffee.

Although the British blockade was keenly felt since 1939, it did not have absolute control over the continent. British naval power could not reach into the Balkans, which German economic initiatives in the 1930s had sought to transform the German trade into a demi-colonial relationship whereby the Balkans provided commodities in exchange for German finished goods. Tobacco production in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece increasingly served the German market and the outbreak of the war accelerated these trends. Additionally, overland contact with Turkey, and after 1940, Spain, allowed a window of sorts to the West for a trickle of products to come through into occupied Europe. In more than a few ways, these trading relationships replicated the First World War use of the Dutch by Germany as a means to evade the Entente blockade. As small-power neutrals, there were limits to how much they could provide either from domestic stores or by exporting their imports, but it was a cheap means in both wars to evade the blockade.

Turkey's economic relationship with the Reich was emblematic for this neutral trade. Ankara initially tried to play both warring sides off each other when war first broke out in 1939, making near-identical demands on Germany and Britain for finished goods and military equipment as the price for stopping or continuing the German trade. The Fall of France and the British need to rebuild its army after losing the BEF's equipment in Dunkirk gave Germany a temporary advantage. A July 1940 trade agreement allowed for Turkish goods ranging from strategic metals like chromium to such sundries as tobacco and dried fruits in exchange for German machine tools, locomotives, and military equipment. This initial bilateral agreements treaty laid the foundations for the subsequent Clodius agreements in 1941, which established the sale of 100 million RM of military equipment in exchange for Turkish raw materials and consumables. By 1943, Germany was Turkey's largest trading partner, much to the consternation of the Allies and some Turkish diplomats who saw the writing on the wall for the Axis. Yet, contrary to the hand-wringing against the Turkish trade in various Allied capitals, the Turks did gain from this arrangement. So long as the Germans were desperate for these materials, Turkish neutrality was assured. Additionally, the bilateral trade of war equipment also further guaranteed Turkey emerged from the war in a greater position of strength than if it had simply been an impartial neutral. The trade itself was not sufficient to meet all of Germany's needs, whether for strategic or civilian consumption, so it gave Ankara a degree of flexibility when confronting the Allies as Germany began to lose the war.

The neutral trade though could not entirely cover Germany's needs. Not surprisingly, Germany often plundered occupied Europe when it came to providing civilian luxuries. The Hunger Plan, a plan to systematically starve the Soviet population to feed the occupation, was only the most extreme of this type of plunder economy. In Western Europe and Scandinavia, German plundering came both from above and below. Occupation authorities had broad powers to expropriate warehouses and other materials deemed necessary for the war effort, and that included luxury consumables and other items necessary for homefront morale. One example of this was in the summer of 1942 where the Goering's officials combed through Western European inventories of toys and bought them at debased prices where they could be prepped and shipped to bombed out German cities at Christmas time that year (yes, the Nazis stole toys!). State procurement agencies bought up the preexisting supplies of such goods and Metz soon emerged by 1940 as a major hub for returning these goods back to the Reich for distribution. The state itself had experience with this type of plunder and redistribution because of its antisemitic Aryanization policies. The SS had already systematized the forced sale of Jewish property with the occupation of Austria in 1938 and such experience was put to good use both in the Aryanization of Western Europe as well as the fleecing of gentiles under German occupation.

But not all the pressure on Western Europe came from state agencies. One of the peculiarities of German occupation was that its troops were paid in the occupied country's currency, but at highly advantageous terms for the RM. Thus an average soldier's purchasing power was far greater in France or Norway than it was in the Reich proper. The initial year of occupation saw an orgy of German soldiers purchasing luxuries that were already rare in the 1930s at what amounted to firesale prices for the sellers. Although some in the German occupation apparatus recognized that this was a self-defeating occupation policy as it created inflation, such fears gained very little traction among a leadership that had already set an example of systematic plundering and ignoring the ramifications of bad financial decisions. American observers of Germany in 1940 and 1941 such as Life magazine often noted that while the British blockade had eliminated overseas access to goods, a number of Germans were eating Belgian chocolates and smoking French cigarettes. This double pressure from above and below depleted the pre-occupation stocks of these luxury consumables and soon began to eat into essential foodstuffs as well.

But like the neutral trade, plunder could only go so far both in terms of strategic materials and consumables. Naturally, the Third Reich also sought to use ersatz substitutes for both to rectify shortcomings. Some substitutions came naturally, such as the use of beet sugar to replace cane sugar, but others were more tricky. Efforts to find synthetic or natural substitutes built both on prewar research as well as First World War precedents. Synthetic rubber and oil helped alleviate the shortages from the blockade and helped ensure the German war machine did not completely grind to a halt. In terms of consumables, ersatz substitutes came both from the state and from individuals with experience from the last war. Gathering nettles and other homeopathic plants, for instance, was one of the wartime activities of the HJ and BDM. Such activities called to mind the desperation of the last winters of the First World War and the Third Reich's authorities walked a fine line between extolling the toughness of the German public while simultaneously hoping science would prevent a repeat of the Turnip Winter of 1916/17.

Coffee was a prime example of the German ersatz to consumables. Unlike tobacco or olive oils, neutrals could not produce enough domestic beans to satisfy German demands. One solution was drink coffee "Saxon-style," also mocked as Blümchenkaffee (flower coffee) so named because one can see the porcelain decorations at the bottom of the cup, in which brewed coffee very weakly. Chicory or acorn coffee was also common and sometime adulterated the real beans to produce something that, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee. These coffee substitutes often received various derogatory nicknames far worse than Blümchenkaffee among the German public; some of these names targeted the state such as "Horst Wessel-coffee" (the "brown' was there only in spirit) to others indulging in racism such as variations on Neger such as "Negro Sweat." Nevertheless, the state recognized that coffee, even if ersatz, was a vital part of civilian morale. Winter care packages to soldiers' families usually included some form of "coffee" and German air raid authorities typically provided coffee, called Zitterkaffee/mocha (jitters coffee), to bombed-out civilians to calm the nerves of those who suffered from Allied bombs. Yet, despite all these efforts, the Third Reich never really solved its coffee problem and this commodity was one of the most sought after on the German black market, especially real beans, and the prices black marketeers could demand were quite high.