When Germans interviewed in the Ruhr more than 35 years later looked back on their postwar encounters with foreign workers, in most cases they referred to looting. Foreigners generally appeared as a threat, reacting in a perhaps understandable way after what had happened to them during the war but who now, without the Nazi police state to control them, engaged in violence and theft.
One man recalled how, after the war, Ukrainians in Essen would pull people from motorcycles, saying ‘Motorcycle mine! Nothing for you, motorcycle ours!’
Another, a woman who made a point of noting how Germans often had come to the aid of foreigners, recalled that foreign workers were ‘on the streets every day with wheelbarrows full of goods’ and that she had witnessed a foreign worker hit a cyclist with a club, grab the bicycle and disappear with it. ‘Certainly’, she admitted, for some looting was ‘a means of survival’, but for others it was a way of demonstrating power and ‘when one considers everything that was done to these people one can understand this’. However, she lamented, ‘only it often was aimed at the wrong people’.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Societies of the Uprooted.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 262. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Quoted in Ulrich Herbert, ‘Apartheid nebenan. Erinnerungen an die Fremdarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet’, in Lutz Niethammer (ed.), ”Die Jahre weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll”. Faschismus-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin and Bonn, 1983), p. 257.
If you enjoy this type of content, please consider donating to my Patreon!
No comments, yet...