poster on the general living conditions from 1914 to 1918
Translation: “Farmers – Do your Duty – The Cities are Hungry”
In August 1916 a group of soldiers’ wives wrote to the Hamburg Senate demanding its support for a peace settlement: ‘we want to have our husbands and sons back from the war and we don’t want to starve any more’.
The government’s failure to ensure adequate food supplies and their equitable distribution, particularly to poorer people living in Germany’s towns and cities, impacted upon popular opinion towards the government and also the population’s support for the war.
Conscription for the army
All men over 18 were forced to enlist, including married men
In this photo, a woman can be seen giving flowers to a man in army uniform.
The man in the photo is the husband, and the woman giving the flowers is the wife
It is a touching image that portrays the longing and sadness that the married men had to part their family with
the turnip winter
WHAT IS IT?
The Turnip Winter was a period between 1916 and 1917 where civilians experienced insurmountable hardship in the form of starvation. In 1914, Germany had gone to war but the Schlieffen plan had not proven successful as the war was lasting far longer than it should have. As a result, farmers that had been conscripted to the army were unable to return to harvest their crops and by 1914 there was already a major decrease in basic food supplies such as bread and potatoes. Rationed foods were in short supply and non-rationed foods experienced a meteoric rise in price due to the reduced supply of food.
This picture shows turnips available for human consumption.
details on the turnip winter
Because many farmers had been drafted into military service, as soon as autumn 1914 there were considerable crop shortfalls and the first bottlenecks in food supplies. In particular basic food-stuffs, such as bread and potatoes, were soon in short supply.
A lot of food items were already rationed in 1914 and could only be obtained with food stamps. Many other non-rationed foodstuffs soon became so expensive that the poorer and low-earning sections of the population could no longer afford them.
In 1917 bread rations were reduced yet again. The worsening supply situation, both in general and of foodstuffs, led to subsequent hunger protests and strikes. These came to assume an increasingly political dimension, combined with a demand for peace but also including an adequate socio-political role for women in accordance with their working lives (demanding the right to vote).
The general economic situation in Germany had deteriorated more and more in the course of the war. The naval blockade imposed by Britain largely cut the German Empire off from any kind of imports.
As early as 1914, all raw materials important for the war effort were administered by the War Raw Materials Department (KRA) under Walther Rathenau. Household objects made of materials that could be used in the war (including copper, tin, rubber) were expropriated. The population was induced by clever propaganda to hand over gold and other precious metals ("I gave gold for iron"). In addition, savings and any available cash ought to be invested in so-called "war bonds".
hindenburg programme
In order to compensate for the large losses at the fronts, more and more men were drafted into military service and the jobs vacated by them, especially in armaments production and other industrial areas, were filled by women.
Lasting Consequences
In Germany alone, about 700,000 civilians died as a consequence of the war. In the last year of the war, 1918, a Spanish influenza raged across the world, killing many undernourished and weakened people.
ROLE OF WOMEN DURING WW1
For women workers there began that gravest endurance test which suddenly threw all theories about female productivity in the workplace overboard. Whereas previously women had been rejected, now they were in demand. To an ever increasing extent our industrial production, agriculture, business, trade and commerce, and with time even a great part of the education system and administration, lay in the hands of women.
-Adele Schreiber (1872-1957), a leading figure in the German Social Democratic women’s movement, and, during the Weimar Republic, an SPDReichstag deputy, in an essay published in 1930.
employment of women
Women replaced conscripted men, producing the goods of war, keeping production going and releasing valuable reserves to the military. Government propaganda focused on women because they were the principle home-front population during the war. Women were the main consumers of German goods, and their support was necessary to keep the economy strong.
German women employed in a munitions factory during WW I.
During WWI (1914-1918), large numbers of women were recruited into jobs vacated by men who had gone to fight in the war.
New jobs were also created as part of the war effort, for example in munitions factories, as weapons were in high demand.
