Contrary to the photo of German children below, life in Germany during World War II was not pleasant. A letter found on the body of a dead Nazi soldier read, "Almost every night the British come over to bomb us, giving us no rest." The letter was written by his family in Germany. The mother of another soldier, who lived in Eastern Prussia, wrote "Last night Lotte said, 'Ach, if only I wouldn't wake up tomorrow morning!' Just think, our Lotte who used to bubble with life and joy so, our Lotte now longs for death! Yes, Rudi, life is becoming more and more difficult....Will this year, too, end without a change, without peace for our country and you poor boys?"  |  Under the Nazi regime, unemployment decreased. The unemployed were given a choice to perform government work or work in a concentration camp. To equip the military, factories were built, providing jobs for the formerly unemployed. The Nazis provided jobs for men in the National Labor Service in the form of digging ditches and planting forests, but they had a small income and lived in camps. The German Labor Front took the place of trade unions and ordered that German workers could neither be fired on the spot nor leave their jobs without government permission. The "Kraft durch Freude" introduced a method by which workers could get a Volkswagen. A worker could pay 5 marks a week until they had paid 750 marks (the average worker received 28-29 marks a week). The money funded weapons factories, and no one actually received a car. |
