The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

What bombing did do was to increase the dependence of the population on both the state apparatus and the party organizations responsible for welfare, reducing even further the space for more serious dissent. Survival depended on not challenging the system. Throughout the heaviest period of bombing, both state and party, assisted increasingly by the armed forces stationed in the Reich, were able to sustain the supply of replacement goods, the distribution of food and water, planned evacuation, and rehabilitation, though transport difficulties and the declining access to European food supplies meant that living standards continued to fall throughout 1944.271 Indeed, for most of the urban population official sources were the only ones available. The risks from black marketeering and looting grew greater as the war drew to a close, and the terror more arbitrary for the German people; military policemen shot or hanged those they caught on the spot. Even in Berlin in the last days before the Russians arrived, hungry survivors were able to find supplies of food dispensed by whatever authority was still functioning.