I

In a letter to the British Military Police on 30 July 1945, the Hanoverian garden plot owner, Dietrich Gahrmann, complained on behalf of himself and other residents of his garden colony about a ‘considerable’ number of nightly thefts of rabbits, chickens, pigs, ‘and even a cow’, by Italian displaced persons (DPs). All along, as Gahrmann related, he and the other garden plot owners tolerated this behaviour. Finally, however, the Germans did fall upon one DP, but only because he had knocked down a tenant. Garhmann related how forty to fifty Italians, armed with cudgels and firearms, subsequently appeared and sealed off the area. The DPs searched each and every dwelling in order to find the men who had attacked the Italian, and ‘it was uttered that, in case the attackers were not found, they would return during the night, pour petrol into the cellars and start a fire’. According to Gahrmann, the DPs announced that they would bring machine guns and remove all the men from their homes. Emphasizing a sense of utter helplessness, while also seeking to demonstrate that German hopes aligned so closely with British goals, he ended his narrative by indicating: ‘As we are unarmed and cannot leave our houses during curfew, we are completely at the mercy of these foreigners and their actions, which cannot in any way be in the interests of the British authorities.’ Ultimately, he hoped to end the assaults by calling upon the Allies to post a guard and to provide for more stringent control of all DP camps, ‘as it can be assumed that, if only camps housing Italians were monitored, that disruptive elements from those facilities might contact Russians and Poles and start trouble’.

Throughout the immediate post-Second World War period, German allotment owners, such as Gahrmann, voiced loudly such grievances and alarm regarding attacks from DPs – foreign workers, prisoners-of-war (POWs), and concentration camp inmates of the shattered Third Reich – on their garden allotments. Time and again, Germans were deeply troubled at how displaced persons laid siege to their garden plots.Footnote ¹ In stark contrast to the innocence, beauty, productivity, and order that their gardens came to represent, DPs, as well as the camps in which many of them resided, emerged as frightful and violent threats to the innocence, beauty, and order that the garden plots came to represent, and, ultimately, to any successful establishment of Heimat.Footnote ²

In recent years, scholars of modern Germany have increasingly explored the mustering of memories for action and the resolution of identities in the late 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ³ Such historians have generally moved beyond the notion that a ‘collective amnesia’ overtook Germans following the Second World War.Footnote ⁴ Studies have demonstrated that Germans had not ‘repressed their past’,Footnote ⁵ or conducted a ‘global retreat’Footnote ⁶ from Nazism. Germans did not simply engage in ‘empty, cold forgetting’Footnote ⁷ or a ‘voluntary silence’Footnote ⁸ concerning their most recent past. Instead of focusing on whether Germans repressed the past or atoned for sins, historians have increasingly sought to address exactly how they did remember the past.Footnote ⁹ In this regard, agreement has generally emerged within memory studies that Germans forged a narrative of their own victimization, and even though scholars still disagree over the extent to which post-war society was consensual or conflictual, they tend to agree that the establishment of a truly coherent memory culture only took place in the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁰

Through an investigation of the profound anxieties of Germans concerning raids on their private garden plots from DPs in the city of Hanover, I argue that a robust narrative of German victimization already formed during the immediate post-war period, an era that has received less attention from historians.Footnote ¹¹ By scrutinizing DP raids on such coveted garden plots in the immediate post-Second World War years, I reveal how individual and group memories, as well as present sufferings and future longings, of Germans already served as a set of ‘practices and interventions’ directly after military defeat. This earlier period is perhaps an even more challenging and fruitful terrain to explore because it was characterized by ‘a society of, among others, many murderers and many more bystanders’, where Nazi legacies of war and the Holocaust were still all around.Footnote ¹² Contrary to Sabine Behrenbeck, who has characterized the immediate post-war years merely as an ‘era of violence’, one in which the difficulties of the Second World War continued for the civilian populace, as well as for prisoners of war, I argue that the period was in fact a time when Germans were already actively composing their own self-serving narrative of victimization.Footnote ¹³ In order to better understand the often frightful reactions of Germans to DP raids on their private gardens, I argue that one should place such fears within the conceptual framework of Heimat (home or homeland). The concept of Heimat has been important for Germans throughout modern history. Not only has it been vital in the development of a collective national identity in the modern era, but it has also assisted Germans throughout traumatic periods of rapid economic and social transformation, as well as during wartime. Indeed, amidst such periods of profound flux, the urgings for Heimat are perhaps even most intense.Footnote ¹⁴

Against Christopher J. Wickham's assertion that Heimat ‘had only a limited role to play’ throughout the immediate post-Second World War years, important only in the specific context of the Heimatvertriebene (political expellees),Footnote ¹⁵ I argue that Germans in Hanover demonstrated a strong attachment to the concept as they struggled to find orientation within an unstable world characterized by profound mourning and sense of loss accompanied by a lack of housing, basic goods and services.Footnote ¹⁶ Following the Second World War, the construction of Heimat would make the world familiar again after such unprecedented destruction and dislocation by allowing the Third Reich and the war to fade away.Footnote ¹⁷ Through Heimat, ‘the fear and uncertainty of self-definition and the fear of responsibility for one's own decisions and, ultimately, for one's own happiness are laid to rest’.Footnote ¹⁸ This ‘element of innocence in Heimat is not secondary but is one of its basic qualities’.Footnote ¹⁹ By constituting a space from which normality could be imagined, retrieved, and hopefully sustained, Heimat proved invaluable for Germans because it ‘buries[d] areas of repressed anxiety’. It ‘keeps [kept] people from being reminded of that which they do [did] not wish to be reminded’.Footnote ²⁰ The very presence of displaced persons, however, would compel remembrance of past crimes on the part of Germans. Without DPs around, Hanoverians could at least strive to maintain some semblance of their own innocence within idyllic, often natural, spaces into which history could not enter.Footnote ²¹ This lack of guilt was essential for the realization of Heimat, which Germans had just ‘pulled out of the rubble of the Nazi Reich as a victim, not a perpetrator’.Footnote ²² Ultimately, the embrace of Heimat could help them wash their hands of guilt for past and present crimes and reintegrate millions of Nazi ‘fellow travelers’.Footnote ²³

A recent and ever-expanding literature on displaced persons has explored the nature of the relationship between Germans and DPs. Since the histories of both Germans and displaced persons became so ‘entangled’Footnote ²⁴ throughout the immediate post-Second World War years, one must scrutinize the multiplicity of varied encounters, both co-operative and hateful, regarding ‘the messy stuff – the nitty-gritty – of everyday life’ in order truly to discern grassroots life amidst the Nazi ruins.Footnote ²⁵ The stories of Germans and DPs ‘need to be juxtaposed and told together’.Footnote ²⁶ Scholars rightly indicate that Germans did not always hold negative views of DPs. Indeed, shared concerns about everyday survival, which both displaced persons and Germans shared, opened up opportunities for reciprocal displays of pragmatic, and sometimes quite cordial and friendly, relations in the realm of everyday life. Nonetheless, such interactions were often quite fraught, uneasy, and fleeting.Footnote ²⁷ For the most part, Germans viewed displaced persons with suspicion and disdain. Historians have offered several inter-related explanations for such sentiments: past prejudices and stereotypes of propensities towards moral laxness and criminality, fears resulting from perceived DP threats to law and order in the form of black market activities as well as physical and sexual violence, anger resulting from the belief that DPs were living the high life amidst an environment of scarcity, mounting frustration concerning the fact that a certain portion of ‘hard-core’ displaced persons refused to leave Germany, and the demand for reparations, to name just a few of the issues.Footnote ²⁸

While such factors are indeed important for elucidating why Germans viewed DPs with such hostility, I believe that one should also take into account German yearnings for Heimat in order to gain an even more complete picture. In this regard, I wish to expand upon the recent work of scholars scrutinizing the immediate post-Second World War experiences of displaced persons, such as Laura Hilton and Margarete Feinstein, who have convincingly argued that Germans sought to depict DPs as dangerous in order to bolster their own victimization narrative, while enabling their own memories as perpetrators of past atrocities to fade away.Footnote ²⁹ Through the use of Heimat within a discussion of DP raids on garden plots, I aim to place such a notion of German victimhood at the hands of displaced persons in its proper context.

II

Within the German context, garden allotments had several different historical origins.

As early as 1830, the city of Kiel set up Armengaerten (pauper gardens) in order to provide destitute urban residents the opportunity of some semblance of self-sufficiency in regard to the production of foodstuffs (particularly potatoes and cabbage), while at the same time, to cut welfare costs which would otherwise have to be used to sustain the poor.Footnote ³⁰ Equivalent to ‘poor allotments’ in England, cities such as Leipzig, Berlin, Worms, Frankfurt, Koenigsberg, Dresden, Stettin, and Danzig rapidly followed Kiel's example. With the beginning of industrialization, and its accompanying thirst for city space with respect to the rapid construction of housing and factories, municipal authorities began to revert to the earlier policy of simply providing the needy with basic commodities, rather than promoting self-help and independence through the allocation of city land for garden plots.

The allotment garden movement in urban centres truly took off only in the second half of the nineteenth century amidst the housing, hygienic, nutritional, and environmental challenges of early industrialization.Footnote ³¹ Like other forms of urban green spaces, such as parks, garden plots emerged essentially as ‘breathing spaces’ within perceived pathological cities.Footnote ³² One form of allotment garden that developed took the name Schrebergarten. Dr Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (1808–61), a German physician hailing from Leipzig, emerged as a fierce advocate of outdoor exercise and recreation for the young. He believed that the establishment of playgrounds in the rapidly dwindling open green spaces within cities would serve a truly beneficial therapeutic means, physically as well as morally, for the nurturing of children by proving the latter with access to nature.Footnote ³³ Three years after Schreber's death, a friend and school head Ernst Innocenz Hauschild (1806–66), director of the Buergerschule 4, transformed theory into action by spearheading the development of a ‘Schreber-Verein’ among interested parents in the city. In 1885, this association leased a meadow upon which children would play under close adult supervision and guidance coming from the parents (such monitoring was integral for Schreber).Footnote ³⁴ Under the leadership of the pensioned pedagogue Heinrich Karl Gesell (1800–79), the association provided seed beds adjacent to the playground space for the purpose of engaging children in a rigorous, healthy, and ‘honest’ leisure activity. Ultimately, however, since the initial enthusiasm of the children faded due to the intensity of the labour involved in working the beds, their parents took over the care of these plots and turned them into individual family allotments.Footnote ³⁵ After just five years, the city boasted one hundred so-called Schrebergarten, the idea for which eventually spread to other cities across Germany and beyond.Footnote ³⁶

Soon enough, certain contemporary cultural movements, such as that of natural healing, enthusiastically adopted gardens along the lines of the Schreber model in order to champion notions of increased natural light, clean air, outdoor exercise, and healthy nutrition in seeking to combat the deterioration of living conditions in urban centres, as well as the increasing use of luxury goods, such as alcohol and tobacco, by city residents.Footnote ³⁷ The Fabrikgaerten (factory gardens) of the civil servants and workers employed by factory managers, mine owners, and the state-controlled railway system belong to another category of allotment gardens emerging at the end of the nineteenth century influenced by the phenomenon of Schrebergaerten. Private and state business owners quickly recognized the practical benefit of enabling their employees and workers to supplement low income by procuring foodstuffs through the cultivation of unused company land.Footnote ³⁸

A second type of allotment garden emerged simultaneously in Berlin. As a result of the seriousness of the housing crisis in overcrowded urban centres, characterized by an inadequate supply of increasingly pricier living space in relation to demand, Laubenkolonien (arbour colonies) began to develop in 1870. These gardens, often on the outskirts of the city, served workers who sought respite from dismal factory conditions, as well as families more generally, who wanted to escape from the notorious backyard squares behind the imposing façades of the city streets. The allotments served such city residents either as weekend retreats, or even as alternative, albeit make-shift, homes. Living in completely inadequate housing and confronting harsh working conditions, urban workers and their families often took the initiative to erect chalets on rented land (from municipal authorities mainly, but also from churches and private owners, all of whom frequently recognized the health, cost-saving, and moral benefits of such sites), and even within so-called wilden Wohngebiete (wild housing regions or squatter settlements), where they could enjoy, even for a while, fresh air, the beauty of nature, and wholesome physical exercise.Footnote ³⁹

Yet another type of allotment garden, the Arbeitergaerten (worker gardens), emerged in 1901. Inspired by the church-sponsored worker gardens he had observed during visits to the 1889 and 1900 World's Fairs in Paris, the city councilman Alvin Bielefeldt co-operated with the German Red Cross in order to set up similar plots in his own city of Berlin, the first one appearing in 1901. Designed to alleviate the catastrophic living conditions of families (particularly large ones of workers and lower-level civil servants) by providing them with green spaces of fresh air, upon which they could engage in a physically and spiritually ‘healthy’ leisure activity, worker gardens spread rapidly to other cities. Indeed, by 1911, Germany already boasted 30,000 such plots within colonies that provided supporting amenities, such as playground, meeting spaces, libraries, and store co-operatives, to name just a few.Footnote ⁴⁰

Despite their varied geneses and forms, the garden allotments were similar in several key respects. All responded to the housing, hygienic, nutritional, and environmental challenges of early industrialization.Footnote ⁴¹ They became sites within German imagination providing solace, predictability, and health for their owners struggling to survive in urban centres undergoing rapid social and economic changes.Footnote ⁴² The allotment plots complemented emerging German social thought, emphasizing physical fitness and proper nutrition, as well as ‘spiritual’ cleanliness through respectable, honest, and worthwhile leisure activities.Footnote ⁴³ The gardens gained existential importance throughout periods of scarcity in the first half of the twentieth century, such as during the First World War, the subsequent period of hyperinflation, and during the Depression years, as additional sources of basic sustenance.Footnote ⁴⁴ After the Second World War, in particular, the chronic lack of housing and foodstuffs across Germany resulted in the common, and often completely unregulated, practice of urban residents (many of them incoming refugees) erecting small hut-like structures on the plots themselves so that families could find (often permanent) shelter, while sustaining themselves on a daily basis through the cultivation of additional foodstuffs and small-animal breeding (often of hens, sheep, goats, and pigs).Footnote ⁴⁵ Even though combat operations during the war destroyed so many earlier allotments,Footnote ⁴⁶ and available building materials for the construction and fencing off of new ones remained in chronic short supply, the often haphazard establishment and delineation of garden allotments went ahead, albeit slowly.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, by often providing their owners with the only chance actually to continue living in cities, the gardens transformed from ‘islands in a sea of homes’ to ‘oases in the desert of rubble’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Allotments serve as ideal sites for investigating German articulations of fear in relation to the danger that DPs posed for them in the immediate post-Second World War years. Indeed, considering that the German inhabitants’ very continued presence in their cities often depended on such garden plots, the ‘disappointment was immense, when the proceeds from the gardens, obtained through hard work, fell into the hands of robbers’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The gardens certainly represented a genuine need to obtain much-needed nourishment for people, ‘who had turned into a nation of garden plot owners and gatherers’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The plots’ allure, however, also symbolized German efforts at focusing on quotidian concerns in order to evade disturbing questions dealing with, for example, why displaced persons were present in Germany in the first place. As sites that fundamentally served to provide ‘sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult of history’,Footnote ⁵¹ and which enabled individuals assertively to ‘give form and articulation to their historical worlds’,Footnote ⁵² garden plots became natural sites at which Germans imagined Heimat. As Rachel Palfreyman points out, at its core, the concept of Heimat reflects ‘the relationship of human beings to their physical surroundings’. It ‘resides in the investment made by people in the spaces where they live and work, especially where their work depends on the natural environment’.Footnote ⁵³Heimat is ‘a site of human activity’,Footnote ⁵⁴ a site that is ‘something physical one perceives with ones senses’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Within the garden, Heimat entails an active cultivation of a habitable place within a livable, natural world. More than just a concept, Heimat is lived experience. In the immediate post-war world, garden plots emerged more than ever as such concrete sites reflecting longings for Heimat.

III

Garden plots dotted the cityscape of Hanover, especially on its outskirts (as they do today). In the city, the first garden plots had emerged as part of municipal effort in 1885 to make land available to the working populace in order to enable the latter to cultivate supplemental foodstuffs. The number of garden plots increased throughout the following years, but only gradually. Indeed, in 1895, the city boasted only eighty-five allotments, which the City Property Office (responsible for establishing allotments) often conceptualized as a merely temporary, economic measure which could be converted later to more efficient uses. During the First World War, however, the garden allotment movement truly received a boost in Hanover, as it did in other cities. In 1918, 6,600 allotments existed in the city, the highest amount ever reached by Hanover throughout the entire era of the Second Empire.Footnote ⁵⁶

After the First World War, the reorganization of garden management in the city reflected the increasingly visible role that allotments had played during the war. The Garden Administrative Office of the city, which had previously focused only on the acquisition, cultivation, and maintenance of city gardens, plazas, and avenues, took up a new area of activity: the planning, laying down, and care of small gardens, as well as the distribution of advice to the cultivators of the allotments.Footnote ⁵⁷ Alone from 1918 to 1920, the number of garden plots in the city doubled to 11,317. In 1932, the number of allotments had risen to 20,000. During the era of the Third Reich, the number of allotments in the city reached 26,000 in 1935, its absolute high point, before dipping to 24,717 in 1941. Since supply met demand, for the most part, only a small increase in the number of allotments took place in the years following the Nazi assumption of power, in stark contrast to the Weimar era.Footnote ⁵⁸

During the Second World War, the importance of garden allotments for individual survival in the city surged once again. When possible, municipal authorities divided the green space within the city into allotment plots. In Hanoverian park spaces, most notably the Herrenhaeuser Gaerten,Footnote ⁵⁹ boasting some of the most prominent Baroque formal gardens of Europe, the city ‘claimed spaces for the cultivation of war vegetables’. The continued allocation of municipal leisure spaces to small garden use continued after the end of the war, for the Garden and Cemetery Administration in the city noted in 1946:

The demand for garden space did not only come from authorities, for Hanoverians coveted them energetically as well. In 1947, the members of the newly founded Allotment Garden City Commission, while discussing the temporary conversion of sports fields into small gardens, noted in their meeting on 24 April that they had before them approximately 4,000 applications for allotments from ordinary citizens.Footnote ⁶²

IV

Besides the strong demand for, and presence of, allotments, however, Hanover proves useful for investigating the manner in which German garden plot owners related to DPs for other reasons as well. As the fifth largest industrial centre in the Reich and a pivotal crossroads for rail and auto traffic (surpassing even Berlin and Hamburg) within Germany, the city quickly emerged as a major site of labour for foreign workers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates, the vast majority from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, during the war. By 1945, about 38,000 foreign workers and prisoners of war (almost 20 per cent of the city population) were employed in Hanover.Footnote ⁶³ Their labour was supplemented by that of inmates from seven concentration camps erected in the city, all subsidiary facilities of the main camp at Neuengamme.Footnote ⁶⁴ By war's end, Allied bombing had transformed the city into a destroyed urban centre plagued by an extreme scarcity of goods and supplies. As a principal transit point,Footnote ⁶⁵ a multitude of native inhabitants, returning evacuees, arriving German refugees, and incoming Allied officials and troops made an increasingly overcrowded Hanover their temporary or permanent home, as did thousands of incoming displaced persons, who added to the number of DPs already there.Footnote ⁶⁶

The exact number of displaced persons who resided in Hanover when Allied military forces took the city on 10 April 1945 is not known.Footnote ⁶⁷ Surviving former inmates of concentration camps at Neuengame, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Braunschweig-Dritte flowed into the city. One British report from April/May 1945 estimated the number of DPs in the city to be 54,000.Footnote ⁶⁸ The most recent study has lowered that number by indicating that, of the population of Hanover in March 1945 (285,371), foreigners accounted for 41,570, comprising approximately one out of every seven city inhabitants.Footnote ⁶⁹ Despite the fact that a slight majority chose to return home throughout the first months following liberation, a significant portion remained because of the relatively generous rations they received, fears of being branded a Nazi collaborator at home, and increasing communist domination of Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁷⁰ In June, the British put the number of foreigners in the city at 36,000. In July, occupation authorities registered 27,356.Footnote ⁷¹ In November, this number dropped to 19,530, comprising approximately 6·5 per cent of the total population of Hanover. Certain national groups, particularly those from the East, wanted to stay put. At the end of 1945, for example, the British estimated that 80 per cent of remaining Poles wished to remain in the city.Footnote ⁷²

Ultimately, DP assaults on garden plot colonies inhabited by Germans may have indeed represented a fervent desire on the part of Displaced Persons not only to assert themselves as active agents of specific ethnic and national groups, but also to highlight, in a brazen and violent way, their own sense of entitlement to unique goods and services, and thirst for revenge, as victimized DPs with agency as well.Footnote ⁷³ The very sight of Germans living in their own homes, remaining in possession of many of their wartime belongings, and dressing fashionably, while often eating fresh vegetables and meat cultivated in their own gardens or those of relatives and friends, reminded DPs of all that had been stolen from them. The fences surrounding DP camps (see next section), the restrictions and rules of camp living, as well as the monotonous food, seemed similar enough to past Nazi labour camps to cause resentment, and in so doing, only fuelled the drive on the part of displaced persons to (re)claim dignity for themselves, their families, their friends, their nation, and their fellow DPs.Footnote ⁷⁴

Inhabitants of overcrowded DP camps continually sought to cultivate cultural spaces not only to lighten the banal everyday existence of camp life,Footnote ⁷⁵ but also within which to recover and (re)construct the traditions, tales, songs, and prayers of their native lands. In many cases, the idea that ‘they (DPs), in exile, represented the heart, the living soul, of their people’ provided the motivation.Footnote ⁷⁶ The tiny cubicles of DP camps ‘became showcases for a wide variety of cultural activities–in literature, art, music, the theatre–that stressed the underlying theme of national uniqueness’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Displaced persons placed their national culture on display through such activities as folkdances,Footnote ⁷⁸ while making ‘patriotic holidays the occasions for new affirmations of ethnic loyalty’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such cultural nationalism, which assisted in ‘the creation and maintenance of a shared sense of self’, provided DPs with ‘both purpose and agency to act within the world of political nations from which they were displaced’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Combined with the multiplicity of educational and vocational workshops, as well as schools,Footnote ⁸¹ which displaced persons established, and in which they participated, such activities promoted pride and independent self-sufficiency among DPs.

On a basic level, re-establishing a semblance of normal life and families in full view of their former persecutors provided DPs with a sense of agency, satisfaction, and retributive justice.Footnote ⁸² The very actions of having, caring, and showing off their newborns by pushing baby carriages represented a significant form of revenge, however problematically defined, within a situation (the presence of an occupying power) where acts of explicit vengeance remained limited.Footnote ⁸³ Sexual contact between DP men and German women not only satisfied the curiosity and desire on the part of the former to taste the forbidden fruit, but also served as an act of revenge by essentially upturning the Nazi racial hierarchy, and in so doing, highlighting its demise.Footnote ⁸⁴ The role reversal of displaced persons having Germans labour for them (either as professionals, such as doctors and nurses, as well as more menial labourers, such as cleaners, plumbers, and cooks) demonstrated the normality of being able to share with others the equal right of employing people and having things done for one by others, manifested claims of entitlement and the enacting of revenge, and ridiculed the Nazi racial worldview.Footnote ⁸⁵ For many DPs, the destruction of German property, or its acquisition through engagement in black market activities, represented yet another form of calculated revenge.Footnote ⁸⁶ Since Germans had stolen all of their possessions, displaced persons felt justified in taking from the Germans.Footnote ⁸⁷ At times, anger at, and revenge for, past Nazi crimes, as well as for the indignities of poor treatment by local Germans, did indeed at times take its most blatant form in physical assaults, such as rape.Footnote ⁸⁸

Violence, however, often resulted from resentment and a sense of entitlement regarding a particular everyday grievance: insufficient and inadequate food. The quantity of foodstuffs was one problem. Time and again, for reasons that will be explained later, British authorities faced unique challenges in the supply and distribution of foodstuffs in their zone. As a result, the occupation slashed rations for displaced persons throughout the immediate post-war years. Initially, the food rations in the British sector for DPs were between roughly 2,300 and 2,600 calories per person per day, the same as in the US zone, but during the first post-war winter of 1945 to 1946, the British cut their ration to 2,170 calories. In March 1946, the British drastically reduced it again for displaced persons in the camps to 1,850 calories per day. Finally, in July of that year, the British zonal authorities slashed the rations for displaced persons yet again to a low of 1,550 calories, an amount the occupation maintained throughout the following year.Footnote ⁸⁹

The quality of food was another issue. For displaced persons, food represented not just a matter of caloric intake and physical survival.Footnote ⁹⁰ DPs linked the type of food they ate with acquiring and maintaining a dignified and healthy normality.Footnote ⁹¹ In the end, however, DPs found themselves in a highly disadvantaged situation regarding the acquisition of fresh and vitamin-rich food stuffs.Footnote ⁹² Displaced persons often did not receive sufficient meat, for the canned variety they consumed was often only 30 per cent meat with the remainder largely composed of potatoes.Footnote ⁹³ In addition, the food DPs received from occupation authorities and from relief organizations was often spoiled and monotonous. DPs ended up relying simply too much on a few, often stale, basic items, such as cabbage soup, potatoes, and bread.Footnote ⁹⁴ In addition, the nutritional value of the food was often negligible. Forced to remain behind barbed wire, displaced persons witnessed Germans in the cities having access to supplemental fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables, often from friends and relatives living on farms, or garden plots.Footnote ⁹⁵ Faced with such developments, DPs feared that they were losing out, and they believed that their past suffering entitled them to eat as well (in terms of receiving more appetizing and nutritionally rich foodstuffs) as their former suppressors, at the very least.Footnote ⁹⁶ Such frustration, the longing for retribution, and the desire to assert themselves as dignified individuals entitled to adequate food, may well have led DPs to undertake raids on German garden plots.

The above behaviour revealed starkly the extent to which interactions between DPs and Germans in the immediate post-Second World War period influenced the meanings displaced persons contributed to their actions and to their identity.Footnote ⁹⁷ Time and again, DPs demanded respect, and demonstrated commitment to reclaim control over their lives and reject the notion of their passive victimization, even while they relied on the goodwill of occupying powers, depended on international aid, and continued to dwell with their former oppressors.Footnote ⁹⁸ After all, at its core, most people's daily life comprises creative acts enabling them to cultivate an independent sense of self and community, despite the presence of overriding power.Footnote ⁹⁹ Such actions on the part of displaced persons caused alarm among Germans, a concern that Allied authorities not only shared, but bolstered as well.

V

Already by the middle of June 1945, occupation authorities had established ninety-three official DP camps in Hanover in order to cope with the thousands of displaced persons present in the city. These facilities were situated not only on the outskirts of town, but within the city centre as well. These camps were usually former Wehrmacht military centres that had large and sturdy structures which the Allies could convert to accommodate DPs. In certain instances, occupation forces also utilized the barracks of former labour and concentration camps. Ultimately, any structures that were still standing (such as schools, offices, etc.) could, and did, come into use as a place to house displaced persons. DP camps had two sets of official administrators: the occupying army of the sector in which a particular facility was located, as well as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an organization that had begun operations already in 1943 (in 1947, the newly created International Refugee Organization replaced the UNRRA and assumed its duties). Both the occupying armies and UN worked with committees within each camp, whose members the DPs within the facilities elected themselves. The committees actually set up their own administrative structure in order to provide for law and order within the camps and the immediately surrounding environs, and since no official policy existed regulating their authority, the power of these committees often depended on which UNRRA director and military commanders were in charge at the time.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The facilities held anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand displaced persons each, and the latter could come and go as they pleased.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In many respects, Allied policies concerning displaced persons just reinforced German views of DPs as threatening. The fact that a significant number of camps for displaced persons in Hanover were in proximity to Germans just seemed to enhance the dangerous image of unrestrained DPs within their midst.Footnote ¹⁰² The existence of such camps demonstrated to Germans that the Allies seemed perhaps to agree with the Nazis before them that displaced persons should be consigned to special and distinct facilities. Indeed, the camps were frequently the same sites in which the Nazis had kept those whom the Allies would later designate as DPs. The Allies even posted their own guards outside and often surrounded the camps with barbed wire. Such camps seemed all the more ominous and threatening in the eyes of Germans since, at least initially, German police were not permitted to enter. Even when German police finally received permission at the beginning of 1947, they could only do so (except in extreme and extraordinary cases) when accompanied by British personnel.Footnote ¹⁰³ To make matters worse (from the German point of view), the Allies took steps to house a portion of displaced persons in rooms, apartments, and homes requisitioned from Germans, burdened as they were by the immense number of DPs and the limited living space available. Finally, the simple fact that a ‘hard-core’ of displaced persons continued to remain in Germany, despite repatriation efforts, increasingly vexed many Germans, who viewed such DPs as privileged parasites.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The Allies themselves expressed exacerbation at the limited success of their repatriation and resettlement policies.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The fact that some displaced persons remained in Germany irritated already frustrated Allied occupation personnel who themselves often depicted DPs as uncivilized threats to the establishment of law and order.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Despite the sometimes drastic differences in wartime experience (some DPs, in fact, had been active Nazi collaborators), captured prisoners-of-war, foreign labourers within the Reich, and concentration camp captives all found themselves classified as DPs. This manner of labelling seriously clouded the true brutality and discriminatory nature of Nazi racial policy itself for Allied administrators and troops on the ground, as well as dissipating sympathy and compassion which they might have felt for surviving Nazi victims.

The depiction of a DP danger already emerged in Allied accounts as US and British forces penetrated deeper into Reich territory in the first months of 1945; displaced persons seemed anything but ‘malleable, thankful, and obedient’ in relation to the forces which were liberating them.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Allies were ‘not only astonished, but indignant’. An American officer commented on the apparent outrage of his colleagues: ‘I can't recall how often I've heard officers of the military government saying: “These damn Poles! It's no wonder they're treated that way by the Germans.”’ That remark reflected the thinking of many American officers who considered DP assertiveness ‘not just as sheer disobedience, but even worse – as malicious ingratitude’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Already within the first days of the occupation of Hanover, Allied observations were replete with melodramatic and terrifying depictions of disorderly DPs. One situation report indicated that ‘a number of Germans powerlessly had to stand by while an armed group of foreigners, men and women, on the order of a woman completely disrobed a German girl’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Accounts often linked DP lawlessness with alcohol. Upon entering Hanover with British occupying forces, the reporter Leonard O. Mosley focused a considerable portion of his account on depicting DP crimes. He related how ‘the first place the foreign workers had made for as the German army fled was the liquor supplies; they battered down the doors and emerged with cases of Schnapps, brandy, and wine … When they got hungry they broke into food stores.’ When the new Hanoverian municipal police (quickly formed by the Allies) intervened, foreign workers ‘fell upon them and hanged their bodies from the lampposts, leaving with their weapons’. Terrifyingly, he wrote how DPs ‘stormed dumps of every kind’. By the night of 10 April, ‘thousands of them were drunk and marauding the city with guns and knives in search for loot and women. There were fires burning everywhere and mad screams and shouts from every street. Wild shots whistled by from the guns of the drunken foreign slaves.’ The British forces dispatched former English POWs ‘to live on neighboring German farms in order to protect them from the depredations of the loot-hungry slave labor’. Reserving some of his harshest criticism for the national committees which the Allies had called upon DPs to form, Mosley noted that the British were appalled at, and eventually even had to take action against, the ‘terror regime’ that the Poles had apparently established in town explicitly to organize raids against and intimidate Germans.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Occupation authorities throughout the immediate post-war period continued to foster a negative image of DPs by tending to exaggerate the criminality of displaced persons, even when compared to their own official police statistics.Footnote ¹¹¹ To be sure, the Allies did seek, at times, to dispel rumors by asserting that foreigners, most notably Poles, overwhelmingly committed crime. The Allies expressed concern, for example, that German garden allotment owners were falsely accusing foreigners of crimes that they themselves committed.Footnote ¹¹² In addition, even while pointing out that the percentage of crimes by displaced persons (covering those living both inside and out of camps) exceeded that of the indigenous population, Allied accounts from time to time sought to express some understanding for such behaviour by tracing it to hard conditions at DP camps, as well as to the fact that displaced persons were ‘torn away from their homes and countries and subjected to hardship and ill-treatment over a number of years’ and have now ‘psychologically come to believe that the German is “fair game”’.Footnote ¹¹³ One of the principal factors accounting for why Poles appear to be the most ‘unruly element’ among the displaced persons, noted one report, was perhaps because ‘they have suffered more from the Germans than most of the other groups’.Footnote ¹¹⁴

For the most part, however, Allied officials, particularly raw recruits just rotating into the occupation administrative structure (and therefore not having been first-hand witnesses to the horrific conditions of many displaced persons at the end of the war in Nazi concentration camps) at the lower operational level,Footnote ¹¹⁵ and often imbued with the same negative prejudices concerning DPs as those held by Germans, regularly noted the immense danger displaced persons posed as troublemakers to post-war stability in the form of armed gangs and black marketeers (with their ‘bases’ of operation in DP camps).Footnote ¹¹⁶ More often than not, these Allied officials believed that only strictness could solve such threats to post-war disorder.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Time and again, Allied reports expressed frustration with, and alarm at, DP criminal activity. In July 1945, the Allies noted that displaced persons had organized themselves into roving gangs whose ‘looting expeditions are conducted as minor military operations’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In August of that year, British corps district commanders received instructions to take ‘drastic measures including shooting at sight’ offenders, who were ‘mainly Poles, and to lesser extent Russians’, for ‘it is not a question of isolated incidents of misbehaviour. We are confronted by terrorism, murder, rape, and robbery by well organized and armed bands’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Another British report from September noted such orchestrated group violence, stating ‘it has been noticeable that where inhabitants of DP camps have been moved the crime position in the district has also shown some improvement’ and that ‘armed raids in rural areas still feature among the more serious occurrences … These are mainly centred on DP camps’.Footnote ¹²⁰ In November, the British pronounced that, in certain cases, the DPs had actually formed themselves into a ‘military formation’, describing clashes between them and the police as ‘pitched battles’.Footnote ¹²¹ By February 1946, the British just assumed that ‘several serious raids by armed gangs of looters’ involved Poles as perpetrators.Footnote ¹²²

One of the principal reasons why occupation authorities conducted periodic raids of DP camps was because the former heavily implicated displaced persons in black market activities. Monthly reports from military and civilian observers on the ground noted that within DP camps, notably Belsen, a ‘brisk trade’ in black market goods took place.Footnote ¹²³ One preventive measure which the Allies took to fight black market activities was so blatantly offensive to DPs that the KZ-Ausschuss filed an official protest.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Allies had placed numerous placards across the city as a warning to black marketeers. The image on the placard consisted of a prisoner behind bars, dressed in the typical, striped uniform of KZ-prisoners. The text read: ‘Black Marketeers, soon you will also sit behind bars!’ The KZ-Auschuss based its protest on the fact that, since prisoners normally wore dark blue uniforms, and especially serious offenders in penitentiaries wore black clothing with a yellow armband, former KZ-inmates were assuming that authorities were linking them directly with black market activities. The KZ-Auschuss complained that the image signified blatant discrimination against all political prisoners, which it most certainly did.Footnote ¹²⁵

Throughout the immediate post-war period in Hanover, both the Germans and the Allies saw what they wanted to see in the DPs. Their portrayals did not entirely reflect reality. Germans actively contributed to the increased plundering which took place in Hanover following the Nazi collapse and before the Allies could establish some semblance of order in the city. Certainly displaced persons did pose a portion of the threat to public order in terms of crime, especially in 1945 and 1946, and certain ethnic groups (Poles) did commit a disproportionate amount of DP crime. Still, the misdeeds that displaced persons as a whole perpetrated were proportionally only the same, or slightly higher, than that of Germans throughout the immediate post-war period. In 1946, of 7,541 criminals sentenced for plundering, theft, and other acts of violence, 7,224 were German, while only 317 were foreign.Footnote ¹²⁶ By early 1947, the crime that DPs did commit had gone down substantially, even after accounting for the fact that many had been repatriated: murder by 65 per cent and robbery and extortion by 30 per cent. For that year, police determined that 14,146 Germans and 292 foreigners were perpetrators of non-violent and violent crime.Footnote ¹²⁷ The German police often did not even reveal these statistics to the Allies because they sought to strengthen the case for the removal of remaining DPs from Germany.Footnote ¹²⁸ Even though black market activities did take place within DP camps, they were certainly just one of the countless places where displaced persons, as well as practically every German, engaged in illegal trades.Footnote ¹²⁹ Displaced persons did receive higher rations by decree from the occupation (at least until October 1946), but they certainly did not receive the ‘bounty’ that Germans sometimes accused them of reaping.Footnote ¹³⁰ The continued reluctance with which Germans volunteered for the Trummerraeumung (clearing of the rubble) demonstrated that the portrayal of Germans as productive and industrious workers determined to build a new Germany by cleaning up their cities was, in certain cases, merely a myth.Footnote ¹³¹

Despite the reality, the portrayal of German as sufferer and DP as criminal in Allied reports persevered. Such a posture ultimately resonated with and contributed to the sense of victimization on the part of Germans.Footnote ¹³² Bolstered by the negative images of DPs the Allies propagated and reinforced, Germans, more than ever, felt endangered and dramatically highlighted the need to solve their ‘DP problem’ in order to satisfy yearnings for Heimat.

VI

Hans Hasche was frightened and at a loss as to what to do. Writing in desperation to the League of Garden Plot Owners of Lower Saxony in the summer of 1945, he indicated that Poles had already ‘occupied’ several garden huts. He argued that most of the crops were either ruined or stolen, noting in detail, for example, that

Hasche had attempted to defend himself and other garden owners by appealing to the police of the neighboring DP camp, which he claimed was technically responsible for the security of the garden colony.Footnote ¹³³ Instead of helping, however, the police actually ‘took command of the looting … They sent away the owners, using truncheons and dog whips in order to get rid of them.’ The police then apparently hung boards proclaiming: ‘Entrance prohibited to Germans – Poles only!’ According to Hasche, the DP police even posted sentries to guard the colony. If they ‘suspected the unauthorized entrance of a garden plot owner … the latter was to be blown away, or sent away, by force’. He wrote that Poles have essentially become the ‘owners’ and have ‘seized full control and direct all activities within the colony’. He ended his petition with the words: ‘I beg you to help us, and utter the wish of all the garden plot owners of the colony to send these people away to another place.’Footnote ¹³⁴

Portraying themselves as law-abiding gardeners, Hasche and his companions emphasized that they merely sought to be left in peace in order to start life anew following the war. The gardens emerge as sites within which the plot owners would be able to accomplish such a goal by providing a concrete, livable space. In a wider sense, Hasche and the other garden owners sought to position themselves as being on the same side as Allied and German authorities concerning the need for Wiederaufbau (reconstruction) and the necessity of fighting a common danger: DPs.Footnote ¹³⁵ Through clear-cut labelling of themselves as law-abiding and DPs as rapacious, they sought to emphasize how displaced persons threatened completely to discredit this effort by forcibly taking over the colony and throwing Germans out. The gardeners laid out a moral code through which they portrayed themselves as good, decent, and productive, while lambasting displaced persons as immoral and dangerous.Footnote ¹³⁶ Language, after all, is ‘a key symbol of personal and political identities and [a] means to define or redefine identity’, and Hasche and his compatriots utilized it to the full in order to assert some of the ethical and racial superiority as a group that defeat in war and subsequent occupation had done so much to discredit.Footnote ¹³⁷

Hasche highlighted more than just a sense of his own helplessness and fear in his relations with DPs, however, for he clearly had a course of action in mind in order to solve his problem with DPs: removal. Certainly, past prejudices may have accounted for some of the hostility. As already noted, most DPs in Hanover (and in Germany in general) were from the East. On a basic level, the Eastern European origins of many DPs may have bolstered the argument on the part of Germans that the former were indeed outsiders who should return, or be returned, to their own homelands.Footnote ¹³⁸ A potent mixture of nationalist, cultural, and biological criteria reinforced such a stance. Germans often viewed such individuals as dangerous, violent, unproductive, and devious, attributes which emerged either explicitly or indirectly from Hasche's frightful depictions of DPs. Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, these stereotypes enjoyed unprecedented societal legitimacy from the state, and to a greater or lesser degree, they seemed to persist in the complaints of Hanoverian garden owners concerning displaced persons following the Second World War.Footnote ¹³⁹

When studying discrimination and persecution, however, one must also place such histories within their own local and particular contexts.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The occupation, accompanied by the incredible material needs of the people under its control, as well as the constant lack of goods and services, only seemed to have exacerbated such prejudices.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Scholars have noted the extent to which the black market, for example, had become a normal, everyday phenomenon, given the post-war circumstances of unprecedented physical devastation, the chronic shortages of basic resources, uncertainty over Allied occupation policies, and the rationing system occupation forces imposed.Footnote ¹⁴² Indeed, shortages of food represented, according to Dennis Bark and David Gress, the greatest cause for misery throughout the occupation period.Footnote ¹⁴³ Already by 1943, basic foodstuffs were in short supply, a problem that would become more serious as the war dragged on. The loss of eastern lands in post-war border shifts only exacerbated wartime food shortages. The German eastern provinces under Polish administration, for example, had previously covered 25 per cent of the foodstuff needs for the city of Hanover.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In their respective occupation zones, British and American officials imported large amounts of wheat, establishing a rationing system based upon a caloric intake fluctuating between 1,100 and 1,500 for average German consumers.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The situation in British-controlled areas was particularly distressed. Covering 97,000 square kilometres with a population of 22·3 million, the British zone was the densest in population compared with the American zone in the south and the Russian in the east, each covering 107,000 square kilometres, and with populations of only 14·3 million and 17·3 million, respectively (the French only received a marginal area and population on the south-western border). Britain, when compared with the United States, was enduring a much more difficult financial crisis at home, for its economy had suffered a severe setback during the war.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Between 1 June 1945 and 30 June 1946, Britain imported 1,245,900 tons of food products into its zone of occupation in Germany. By July, the hard-pressed Labour government had to institute a policy that it had actually been able to avoid throughout the war: the rationing of bread in Britain. This step had resulted, to a great extent, because of the necessity of transferring wheat to Germany.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Since war had devastated Germany's industrial nerve centres along the Ruhr and Rhine, the British zone suffered from a shattered, and therefore ineffective, distribution system.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Despite the dismal quantities of food that DPs received, Germans nonetheless often resented displaced persons for their relatively privileged status concerning the allocation of resources, most notably food. As indicated earlier, displaced persons, for example, did indeed receive higher rations by decree from occupation authorities until October 1946. For Germans, such favouritism was all the more unjust since DPs, at least until the end of 1946, were not required to work.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Besides past prejudices and present challenges, however, I argue that Hasche and his fellow garden plot owners ultimately were also expressing longings for, and frustration at being unable to achieve, the productivity, innocence, and normality of Heimat. A study of such emotions, and of feelings in general, correct an assumption that people direct their actions primarily, and merely, according to a rational cost-benefit analysis. Indeed, cultural ideas, values, and discourses, such as those surrounding the concept of Heimat, for example, arouse feelings that could and do decisively influence human action and make history.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Emotions, after all, are ultimately ‘among the tools with which we manage social life as a whole’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Often hidden in written texts,Footnote ¹⁵² like Hasche's letter, such sentiments are ‘linked closely to meaning-making’.Footnote ¹⁵³

Energetically filing letters of complaints to Allied authorities, German garden plot owners like Hasche pointed to the chronic disturbance of their gardens, the theft of their fruits and vegetables, and the outright takeover of their garden allotments by DPs.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Frantically, German gardeners sought direct action on the part of the occupation authorities to alleviate their distress. Through such petitions, Germans articulated a moral language clearly delineating ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups. The ethical code that they laid out to the Allies provided meanings for who was good and decent, and therefore deserving and entitled to assistance (themselves), and who was immoral and dangerous (displaced persons). Even though the sources do not reveal whether such efforts were ever truly effective in galvanizing the occupation authorities to concrete action, such letter-writing on the part of the German gardeners certainly bolstered their own status as victims, while at the same time projected DPs as perpetrators of violence and threats to law and order. The sheer fact that German gardeners took the effort to write (and sometimes even type!) such letters (at times just scraps of paper or postcards used multiple times)Footnote ¹⁵⁵ amidst a period when stationary and typewriters, as well as the time to procure and utilize them, were such rare and precious resources indicates the urgent importance they attached to airing their plight, whether or not such efforts ever led to actual concrete results.

Throughout the first year of occupation, ‘complaints of destruction came from small garden colonies throughout Hanover’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Such voicing of concerns persisted throughout the following years.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ When taking up the issue of crimes taking place in the garden plots, newspapers repeatedly highlighted the productive capacity of gardeners and the sites they cultivated, on the one hand, and the destructive tendencies of displaced persons, on the other hand. In July 1947, for example, the press began reporting on the resourcefulness of small garden owners in establishing their own night patrols (beginning at midnight) in order to provide for their own protection, and that before such action was taken, a theft would take place almost every night that would rob a garden plot owner of the fruits of his or her hard work: ‘Since the guard duty, in conjunction with police patrols, has been instituted, the burglaries have become more seldom. The small gardeners protect the calories they have worked so hard to produce with the means that are available for them.’Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Such moves for self-defence continued into the following year.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Sympathetic stories appearing in the press, often quite touching and providing ample space for the subjects themselves to voice their sentiments, not only detailed the industriousness and honest labour of the gardeners, but linked the work of garden plot owners with the construction of a happy and peaceful future. The gardens emerged not only as sites to obtain much-needed nourishment through efficient labour, but as places to achieve a bucolic tranquillity in which to enjoy life as well. They became the places within which their owners could satisfy yearnings for Heimat.

One piece, appearing in the Hannoversche Presse in March 1946, poignantly related the varied ways in which gardens served as sites fulfilling longings for Heimat. It indicated how fervently one particular family cherished its garden plot:

This description not only emphasizes the garden as a site of eager Germans determined to labour and be productive, but also as a peaceful place of beauty. Ultimately,

Within the garden, the family feels safe and secure, inhabiting a space into which the past struggles (the ‘terror’ of last winter, which could be referring to the ferocity of the weather, the war, or both) of their most recent history could not truly penetrate. Warmth, tranquillity, the soothing sounds of nature, and fruitful work first and foremost characterize their experiences on this particular day:

Ever ready to improve the productivity of his plot with modern gardening techniques, the grandfather had even

By actively demonstrating personal industriousness and ingenuity, and by utilizing traditional time-tested techniques, as well as innovative solutions, such gardeners would make the most efficient use of the scarce materials and resources available to them. Certainly, challenges, such as the cold weather, abounded for the plot owner, but it is precisely ‘because gardening is fraught with so many risks of failure that its victories afford such a singular satisfaction’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Defiantly, the family above seemed determined to create a garden space within which man and nature would thrive in a mutually beneficial, dynamic relationship. Such an image of Heimat emerges within the latest scholarly literature on the subject. Challenging the view that yearnings for Heimat merely entailed the fanciful desire to retreat into a distant past of a nature untouched by modern man,Footnote ¹⁶² recent historians have noted that strivings for Heimat often entailed the construction of an organically balanced, forward-oriented working landscape within which man and nature would both prosper within a livable and sustainable future.Footnote ¹⁶³ The interrelationship of man and nature would be ‘marked by a spirit of recognition, integration, and cooperation’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Designed creatively by the owners themselves rather than by professional garden architects, garden plots not only offered an opportunity for personal expression and the seizing of an initiative, but provided precious foodstuffs.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ By ‘gardening their plots’, gardeners ‘would be confident and self-reliant during hard times’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Ultimately, therefore, garden plots captured the transcendent wishes and needs of their cultivators.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ As Werner Nohl has noted, gardens in the immediate post-war period epitomized a wish to move beyond an incomplete and turbulent presence in order to arrive at a better future.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Epitomizing Heimat, they were healthy places reconciling human action and natureFootnote ¹⁶⁹ within which their owners secured innocence, exercised freedom, experienced happiness, and simply had fun.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

For Germans, the threat from DPs emerged to threaten, and actually take over, such sites, humiliating their previous owners in the process. Italian and Russian displaced persons, for example, broke curfew and occupied several garden allotments, compelling the owners to clean the bathrooms for them.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In an almost exactly similar event, three Poles (one woman and two men) simply took over a couple's garden and hung a sign proclaiming that ‘in their own interest, the garden owners are going to clean the lavatories for the Poles’.Footnote ¹⁷² In the garden allotment at Suedstrykn, women complained that Poles took over, threw them out, and would not allow them to re-enter.Footnote ¹⁷³ Paul Richter reported that three foreigners entered his garden colony and started to destroy the garden arbours, breaking into his own hut, ‘in which I had been living since I was bombed out’ during the war. In the police report, a witness, Frau Knopf, stated that the attackers spoke Polish, and that they escaped in the direction of the nearby Polish DP camp (‘Muhleburg’). In addition, she noted that she had seen Poles from the camp looting the garden allotments numerous times before.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

Like Hasche, garden plot owners often aired their concerns and appealed for help through petitions. In June 1945, Paul Ziese wrote to the police pleading for protection from Poles and Russians who, he reported, were continually looting his small garden. He pointed out that ‘no sooner are the seeds sown, displaced persons come and take the unripe fruit by force’. He expected help, since he had heard in press pronouncements from the military government that every little portion of ground had to be cultivated and a promise that it would do all it could to assist Germans in such efforts. He warned that if preventive action were not taken, the hope that ‘we will become independent in providing our own nourishment’ would be permanently dashed.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Although brief, this letter nonetheless captured the essence of how Germans sought to portray themselves in relation to DPs. Revealing his concerns in a dramatic way, Ziese contrasted, in sharp terms, his own productive efforts to cultivate and to nourish with DPs who engage in looting and simply take what they wish.

Even more than Hasche, Ziese linked his own work with that of the Allies. For him, Germans and Allies should be fighting the principal threat to all: DPs. Within their stories of woe, plot owners not only drew a sharp contrast between themselves and displaced persons, but pointed towards what should be shared concerns between themselves and the Allies as well, linking their own strivings for Heimat directly with Wiederaufbau efforts. One farmer, Richard Bartols, poignantly explained:

In his narrative, Bartols highlighted the particular heinousness of the crime the DPs committed. In addition, with his demand for constant Allied protection, he not only sought to shift some responsibility for solving his difficulties with DPs to the British, but also quickly seemed to blame the latter for much of his own current victimization at the hands of displaced persons. Clearly drawing a distinction between himself and DPs, Johann Fischer, another garden plot owner, complained ‘that all his vegetables, potatoes, and fruit are damaged or stolen … by Poles’. Echoing Ziese, he begged from the Allies ‘an investigation and protection against these people who reap the fruit of other people's work’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Within such narratives of DP raids on garden plots, Germans did admit that they became violent as well. Nonetheless, as the case of the garden colonist Dietrich Gahrmann demonstrated, Germans argued that they only acted out of necessity, and ultimately for justifiable reasons. In the end, Germans could thus maintain their morality and secure their status as helpless victims who really did no wrong. In so doing, the innocence integral to Heimat remained secure.

While criminal reports, newspaper accounts, and letters of petition concerned the suffering of individual gardeners beset by DP raids, they also spoke to the sense of community among gardeners, not only as aggrieved plot owners, but as victimized Germans. In one set of garden plots, the owner William Mueller indicated that the DPs (Poles and Italians) ‘felt that they were entitled to do what they wanted’. It ‘is not only the question of stealing fruit and potatoes, but of destroying the entire crop by pulling out all the plants, devastating the beds, and breaking the branches full of unripe fruit off the trees’. As a rule, he and garden plot owners ‘are molested and threatened everyday by Poles with truncheons, sometime ago even by a Pole wielding a firearm’. He related how his wife apparently overheard the Poles ‘talking about how every garden owner ought to be killed’. He lamented how the garden plot owners are all poor people who have struggled to achieve greater self-sufficiency regarding food production, but ‘all their toil had been in vain … Steps ought to be taken in order to prevent DPs from ruining everything the poor garden holders have worked for throughout many years.’ In this portrayal, displaced persons were devoid of any respect for property, industrious labour, or even for life. To make matters worse, while the DPs were pillaging, Mueller indicated how they proved very ‘insulting … shouting “German pigs”’. At this point in his account, Mueller expressed shock at what he considered the unreasonable cruelty of displaced persons. According to him, not only did the displaced persons pillage, but they even had to slander in the most repulsive manner. Wishing to draw a stark contrast between the ruinous behaviour of displaced persons and the decency, kindness, and reasonableness of not only himself, but of the other plot owners as well, Mueller indicated that ‘not one of our garden owners would have objected giving to those people whatever they wanted, but now we are not even allowed to move about in our gardens freely’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Ultimately, however, Mueller concluded that displaced persons simply could not comprehend kindness. For him, they only understood abusive language, theft, and destruction. Wishing for his ‘DP problem’ to go away, he requested guard protection to ‘keep out those DPs that cause all the trouble’, and recommended that the Poles currently occupying the garden huts simply be ‘removed’ and placed within a DP camp adjacent to the garden colony.

Through such individual and localized narratives of victimization at the hands of displaced persons within gardens, Germans thus articulated wider and shared sufferings of a German nation. Such sentiments should not surprise us, for scholars have demonstrated the vital importance of nature in the definition of German nationalism, particularly during periods of pain and loss.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Although Heimat itself was grounded in the local, and articulated within specific spaces, it nonetheless fostered membership and inclusion in a larger German nation.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Indeed, the very ‘utility of Heimat lay in its capacity to obscure any chasm between small local worlds and the larger ones to which the locality belonged’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Speaking of a later period, Robert Moeller has persuasively argued the extent to which 1950s Germany was a place where a vibrant ‘politics of commemoration’ took place, through which a relatively unified national community of Germans fought a war, survived defeat, and first and foremost saw themselves as sufferers. In so doing, ‘Germans expressed solidarity with their beleaguered Volksgemeinschaft (national community)’.Footnote ¹⁸² Most recently, Neil Gregor has rightly indicated the need to recognize that the shared experiences of the Opfergemeinschaft (community of victims) emerging from the Second World War encompassed varied constituencies of people who faced differing degrees of past and present suffering.Footnote ¹⁸³ Nonetheless, the extent to which German gardeners in Hanover zeroed in on their own unique plights as individuals, while placing themselves within a morally and racially superior wider community of victims besieged by displaced persons, must not be underestimated in any examination of German longings for Heimat in the immediate post-Second World War period.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Concepts of race, although often recast, and becoming operational, within German claims regarding entitlements and rights, remained at the centre of collective imaginings throughout the immediate post-war period.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ To a large degree, ‘notions of both German cohesiveness and unassimilable difference’ persisted.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

VII

Throughout the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, German garden plot owners in Hanover portrayed themselves as helpless victims and displaced persons as dangerous criminals to be feared and loathed. A variety of factors, invariably interrelated, accounted for such views. Defeat in war did not seem to destroy past prejudices. Indeed, the chaos and instability of the years immediately following the fall of the Third Reich probably reinforced and invigorated such sentiments. Considering their own severe past and present experiences of war and occupation, German gardeners understandably felt disoriented, irritated, and fearful within a world of want and despair seemingly controlled by privileged foreigners, many of whom would stubbornly refuse to return to their homelands. Within a devastated cityscape of scant resources, German garden plot owners lashed out at displaced persons precisely because the unlawful and violent actions of the latter presented one of the greatest immediate and everyday threats to their own desperate efforts at procuring supplemental food anyway they could.

Ultimately, however, in order to account fully for such hostile views towards DPs, I have argued that one should also consider such sentiments as emotional displays of, and frustrated longings for, Heimat within a memory culture of victimization Germans had already developed throughout the immediate post-war period. In articulating urgings for Heimat, German gardeners portrayed displaced persons as immoral, dangerous, and violent, a constant threat to their own astounding ‘determination to rebuild’ and ‘all powerful instinct to set order against near total chaos’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ DPs threatened German efforts at ‘creating a pocket of repose in the midst of turbulence’.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Such depictions, which the Allies often strengthened and maintained, enabled German garden plot owners to feel empowered again and to reaffirm past patterns of inclusion and exclusion, superiority and inferiority. For them, DPs had to be removed from their presence, perhaps returning to their countries of origin. Confronted with their own immense everyday challenges, Germans believed that displaced persons had no place within their midst, and that the latter should cease burdening German communities.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ By forging their own exclusive ethically sound and ethnically defined national community of sufferers, Germans could realize their yearnings for the innocence, tranquillity, productivity, and social stability of Heimat, as well as lay the basis for the establishment of democracy after 1945.