Homeless people in the Reich, or not?

[winterlight]

I've read that most social misfits were interned in camps as 'Asoziale' or something like that. I'm wondering if there were actual communities of transients, vagrants, "bums", living in major cities such as Vienna and Berlin, during the war, (i.e., like there are now in the US) or whether the regime "solved" that problem completely. Did 'flophouses' like the one Hitler once lived in still exist? I need to know this as background for a book I'm writing as I'm hoping one of my characters can "hide out" as a homeless vagrant in Vienna. It would not work if he were the only one!! Greg, do you know the answer to this? Thanks in advance to this wonderful, helpful community!!

[GregSingh]

I'm wondering if there were actual communities of transients, vagrants, "bums", living in major cities such as Vienna and Berlin, during the war, (i.e., like there are now in the US) !

I seriously doubt that.

There were many places providing temporary accomodation for homeless people, but they were homeless because their houses/appartments were bombed by allies. Towards the end of the war problem was growing so rapidly, that temporary accomodation quite often became permanent one for many.

Generally problem of social misfits, etc. was "solved" before the war or early on during 1939/41.
But there were always people who went "off the grid" for various reasons, like to avoid conscription or just hiding from prosecusion like Jews. Sadly you had to have serious survival skills and a lot of external help to be able to do that. It was not for so called "village idiots", unfortunately these were most likely not among living after 1941...

[CRAIG CARR]

"If you don't work..you don't eat!" was blared multiple times a day in Berlin from loudspeakers by subway tunnels and on street corners with kiosks. If you look at the album I made for my mother who is now 91 and grew up in the Kreuzberg park area.. you will see a foto of the elderly put on brick recovery duty after each bombing in the city.It is in the topic on page 2 of Meine Mutti's Gerbustagalbum. It was considered a criminal and arrestible offense not to work unless one was crippled.
The work week was expanded from 10 to 12 hr work days in 1944. Jobs were assigned to highschool graduates.Everyone as expected to do their share for the united war effort. Bosses could demand you work up to 4 extra hours as a 13 day work week was initiated.ONE was expected to work a week and half straight before getting day off.Refusal to comply, or to refuse an assigned job was a jailable offense."Chronic slackers" were far and few between as the arrest and sentence for that offense was a work camp train trip to hard labor. As nearly 80% of the city was reduced to rubble, or apartments without roofs, or missing walls from phosphorous and concussion bombings as my mother's home of 4 stories,at Grossbeerenstrasse 39 was imploded on the night of Jan.30th, 1943, at 7 pm that snowy evening...74 yrs later.. it is still a vacant lot.
Under the Point Blank Policy of the Allies in 1943,schools, hospitals, churches and apartment buildings were all directly targeted.... leaving the only "safe" place for the "homeless"being the subway system. At 5 pm each night in Berlin... sirens would wail to alert the public to seek shelter in the system before the nightly air raids would start... every night homeless families would find a spot to curl up on the loading causeways,as hospital patients on stretchers were laid out side by side on parked rail car seats. Trying to compare homeless people as we see in our cities of today would be next to impossible as the city was in total blackout since the Fall of 1939.The danger of being incinerated alive in city streets from air raids liquifying the streets into walls of flames or being caught in a backdraft that caused rolling waves of flames that literally lifted people off their feet pulling them upward into mini fire tornadoes from rubber pellets soaked in napalm exploded above the heads of fleeing civilians from their burning apartments, that ignited anything they landed on,flaming concrete and people into human candles made the concept of "living on the streets", as people are now doing would be a death wish impossible reality.One's only chance of survival daily was shelter in a basement.. or finding a subway tunnel entrance.
I can ask an Austrian friend if she recalls anything different about Vienna as she was there as a 12 yr old,but as it was also under Third Reich Laws of control.. .I think it would be the same as in Berlin. A fictional character choosing to be homeless and surviving on the street, I would have great doubts about given the laws and crackdowns the public barely survived.. I'd suggest you scroll down to my post called," Meine Mutti's Geburstagalbum".. and look at Berlin civilian life in the pictures in the album I laid out by the years... it might give you a better understanding of what daily terror it was to live under the Third Reich where each day was a dare to survive. kindest regards, CRAIG.

[winterlight]

That was my impression, but you have illustrated the point exceptionally well. The situation is slightly different in Vienna only because I think (and the emphasis is on the word think - I don't KNOW) that there is an extensive system of tunnels and ancient catacombs under the inner city in Vienna. The character who is hiding out only needs to do so for a week or so, and has a food stash down there already somewhere. So the important thing would be to avoid being noticed and asked for papers. I'm hoping I can get away with this. I do know Vienna was being bombed by this time (second half of 44) but I am fairly sure it was nowhere near as bad as the major cities in the Altreich. If anyone knows anything about how extensive the catacombs and tunnels under Vienna are/were in '44, please chime in. Thanks. I did try to look at your album last year, Craig, but for some reason I couldn't get it to open. I'll give it another try. What a life she's had!

PS: If anyone is interested in the concept of subterranean existence in general, the book "Mole People" is a great read.

[Ahnenerbe1]

Hey guys, don't mean to hijack this thread, and the bottom line is there were no "homeless" people before the war. The NS welfare organizations helped all who wanted it, the others were forced to leave the country or sent to an institution, according to people I have interviewed who lived in the Reich. For Craig, is there any written (documents) regarding such "forced labor" and loud speakers? The reason I ask is that the people I interviewed from Berlin (and other major cities) all gave me a different impression. Not enough people worked, and many who were bombed out and lost family were asked to only do very light labor (meaning volunteering for soft jobs).

I interviewed a woman who lived in the Kreuzberg area and she explained what Berlin was like under the bombs, she was adamaent that many ex-communists in this area shirked their duty to help clear rubble. "They were lazy, and refused to put in their fair share, and the police were too understaffed and busy dealing with missing people and unexploded bombs to force them." These were her exact words given to me in a 1989 interview, and she gave me the impression that not enough was done to make civilians do a fair share of work.

[CRAIG CARR]

Wie gehts Ahnenerbe1,
A dear friend of ours who also grew up in Berlin in the Charlottenberg Area named Gisela wrote book of her experiences as my mother did that were both fleeced by the publisher, which is how we met. She was very meticulous in digging through old newspapers she kept from WW2 of Morgen Post and Berliner Zeitung amongst many others, as every law Hitler wrote were publicly printed and made law th very day they appeared....we are talking every week new laws being put into law overnight...what was acceptable one day was outlawed the next...with sever punishments for infractions.
In her book."Memoirs of a 1000 years old woman" by Gisela McBride published by First Books, she mentions on page 443 the changes in work laws in July and September of 1942.Meine Entschuldigung( my apology..I recalled her saying it was 1943) the following order was issued on July 30th:: "An employee MUST accept any kind of work He/she is given and is obligated to perform it. He/she cannot refuse or delay whatever work may be referred to him/her, including extra hours.night. Sunday.and holiday shifts. He/she cannot in violation of His/her duty stay away from work without valid excuse or repeatedly be late for work without valid reason or leave his/her job. Offenses are punishable by fines,or imprisonment for two years, for staying away from work or loafing on the job. Punishment was two to three years in jail.People, who after a 14 hr work day felt incapable of working additional overtime were sentenced to one year in jail." An 88 hr work week was instituted that one worked 13 days straight and got one off... though you were still susceptible to being called kin to work n that one day off. It was a very demoralizing work existence for the public.....decreed and enforced for the common good of the war effort. I regret I cannot refer you to her directly as she just passed away last year. If you have fluent German speaking friend you might be able to obtain a copy of the newspaper announcement from the Berlin State Library of papers that exist from July 30,1942.
My uncle Gerhardt had school classmates whose fathers were shipped to labor camps for refusing the bossses orders for extra hours and shipped out overnight to labor camps for about 6 months, terrifying.
.Gisela lived near a corner with the daily loudspeaker announcements.. that were hated by most residents.. but became a life saver when the "Bavarian alert" was employed to give a 4 minute extra warning prior to the arrival of bombers before the street sirens went off. Radio stations seeing incoming bombers would alert the radio stations in the direction they were flying for air raids and broadcast the sound of a cuckoo which they found could wake the soundest of sleepers., as the night sirens became very common and the public became complacent to the siren wail. Those who heard it had about 4 extra minutes to get up and run to the basements. Maybe that i of interest to you? best regards, CRAIG.

[CRAIG CARR]

Dear Winterlight, sorry you have had problems opening the album. My friend Anne said that Google's picasa has a melt down messing up some of the album pages and her computer has broken so she is unable at this time to fix and restore it, plus add the new pages I am assembling for her to scan as I use my techless skill with scissors and glue to cut and paste the pages together and caption them..for her to scan into the album as I am working on the last pages of the Fall of Berlin. If you pull up her page of albums, you;ll see a woman in a Luftwaffe coat with the word SiegHell next to her.. click on that.. and the album should open up easily for you. http://picasaweb.google.com/anne.loftin/Sieghell#

I put as many documents into the album along with my Mother's relatives surviving fotos, that are captioned with their oral histories of what they barely survived daily.Like the mandatory Ahnen Pass books and the Ermachtigungsgesetz laws that stripped away every citizens rights away overnight that they learned about opening the morning newspaper on March 23, 1933.Can you imagine going to bed with a democratic constitution in place and awaken to find it was dissolved at midnite with out public consent and replaced one minute later with a dictatorship? You'll see that she performed in the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympics - still her happiest memory...and went from that great JOY to performing in the very last public spectacle.. the Orchid show of 1940 the week before the first bombs fell on Berlin. My late cousin scanned many of the posters my Great Aunt was obligated to display in her theatre lobby I sprinkled through the album that you may get a better idea of what civilians saw daily.My uncle Gerhard was in a kamera klub in the Hitler Jugend, and after the war he and his friends sold pictures from under their overcoats off of wires with clothespins to sell and 4 cents a piece to help feed their families.. 4 pictures was a loaf of bread.he gave me an envelope of pics he used to sell on street corners before he died I am very glad he shared them with me.
You'll see my mother lost her voice and eyesight for a year throwing phosphorous bombs off of her family's apartment building roof and what her home looked like before it was reduced to rubble in January of 1943.My mother was drafted with 20 other high school girls in January of 1945 and after a 6 minute physical shipped overnight to Konigsgratz CZ and drafted with 1000 teenage girls to learn telegraphy..and was sentenced to death by hanging in March of 1945. Every time we open a marzipan bar from Lubeck, it is a bittersweet celebration of a delicious German confection, and also a reminder she was being taken to Lubeck to be publicly hanged at the Flight School and inspite of the Third Reich, beat the odds to live to tell about it. You are quite right...she is a remarkable survivor who witnessed history..which is why I made her the birthday present of the album.She like so many other survivors have incredible stories to tell of their experiences..which is why we are here. I asked my Viennese neighbor about the catacombs you referred to.. and she asked, did he mean the ones that run under many of the old churches in Vienna going back to biblical days of Byzantium? it might be a resource point for you to look into contacting Viennese tour guides.. I wish you great luck with your creative project, kindest regards, CRAIG

[history1]

No need to obtain a copy of a newspaper. Hundreds of thousands pages online with the possibility to print them at home at the Austrian National Library:
http://anno.onb.ac.at/alph_list.htm