Berlin

As the enthusiasm for volunteering ebbed and conscription became the major source of cannon fodder, peasants and urban workers made up the bulk of the forces at the front. Yet industrial workers (as opposed to farm laborers) remained under-represented relative to their numbers in society. On average they were less physically fit and therefore more likely to be exempted for health reasons. Also, despite the proclamations of national togetherness, the officer corps was reluctant to recruit a mass army of left-oriented laborers who, the officers feared, might turn their guns against their superiors. Finally, with the need to man the machines at home becoming as important as putting soldiers in the field, highly trained industrial workers were simply too valuable to be expended wholesale in the trenches. Increasingly, industrial workers either received exemptions or were recalled from the front to work at home. A total of 92,400 Berlin workers were recalled over the course of the war. This special treatment inevitably fueled resentment among the urban bourgeoisie and peasantry, leading to accusations that the workers were “shirking” their duty to the Fatherland. Moreover, because Berlin was so heavily working-class, the city mobilized a lower percentage of its males of military age (60 percent) than the national average (80 percent). Here was more fodder for disgruntlement, more reason for citizens across the nation to see the capital as less patriotic than other parts of the Reich.

This perception was all the more problematical because another consequence of the lengthening war was to centralize national power in Berlin even more extensively than had been the case before. Berlin became the headquarters of new bureaucracies designed to coordinate arms production, allocate resources, and distribute manpower. The staffing of these bureaucracies kept another large contingent of capital-dwellers out of the trenches. It did not go unnoticed in the rest of the country that men with cushy jobs far from the front were the very ones making the decisions regarding sacrifices for the war effort. “Why must everything be concentrated in Berlin?” asked a provincial legislator. Berlin’s alleged status as a Kriegslieblingskind (favored child of the war) fueled calls “to move some of the Reich agencies out of Berlin.”

Berlin’s emergence as the seat of a centralized war economy was due in part to the influence of Walther Rathenau, the mercurial president of the General Electric Company, one of the city’s largest firms. He and his colleague Wichard von Moel-lendorff knew that, industrially speaking, Germany was not prepared to fight a major war. Not only were there no stockpiles of strategic goods, there was no plan for stepping up production or coordinating distribution of needed materials. As early as August 1914, Rathenau prevailed on the War Ministry to establish a Raw Materials Section with himself at the head. He and his group immediately set out to remedy some of the worst deficiencies. Without this agency Germany would not have been able to carry on with the war for more than a few months after the failure of the Marne offensive. Thus the most important figure in keeping the Reich in the conflict was not Hindenburg or Ludendorff, but a Jewish industrialist from Berlin.

Berliners admire a model trench in a local park, 1915

Berlin continued to get a large percentage of draft exemptions because its industrial base, already huge at the war’s outset, grew even larger as the conflict progressed. Local manufacturing firms exploited their contacts with the war bureaucracies to obtain the most lucrative military contracts. This allowed the companies to pay exceptionally high wages and to lure workers to the capital from other parts of the Reich. The city’s many metalworking firms were particularly adept at this game. Once they had recruited thousands of new workers, the firms prevailed upon the War Ministry to issue a decree prohibiting the workers from changing jobs.

The recall of workers from the trenches, however, soon proved insufficient to meet the manpower needs of Berlin’s wartime industry. The government responded by recruiting more and more women for jobs normally performed by men. Although this practice was adopted by all the belligerent nations, Germany, and especially Berlin, took the lead in the feminization of industrial labor. Between 1914 and December 1917 the number of female workers increased by 279 percent in Berlin’s machine tool industry and by 116 percent in metalworking, which meant that by the end of 1917 over 50 percent of the workers in these fields were female. Other occupations were feminized as well: Ambassador Gerard reported seeing women at work building railroads, driving the city’s post carts, even serving as motormen on the tramways.