Boy 1943
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Junge 1943
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Group 1947
The photo below shows ---
Gruppe 1947
Das Photo unterhalb zeigt ---
Group 1947
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Gruppe 1947
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Couple 1947
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Paar 1947
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Soldiers and "German Fräuleins"
1947
The American soldiers in Germany during the occupation after the war
were very lonely and longed for feminine companionship. They therefore
enjoyed meeting unattached German girls in bars and also in some of
the clubs where mixing between the two sexes was encouraged. The G.I.s
were popular because they could supply things that were scarce for
the Germans, such as cigarettes, chocolate bars, soap, and even silk
sockings, which could be bought in the PX on the American bases but
were hard to obtain in the German outlets. There was a big black market
in such commodities at the time, and the American government began
paying soldiers in "script" (a special currency that only the Americans
could use). This was to cut down on the black market - soldiers selling
cigarettes to Germans for huge sums of marks and then translating
the profit into American dollars to be sent back home to the soldier's
bank. But there was a lot of black market activity anyway on a sort
of barter system - trading goods for goods and services, for instance,
instead of actual money.
One of our readers, who was a soldier at the time, told us: "I
used to have a huge load of laundry done by a German lady in Regensurg
for only a bar of soap (she kept half of the soap as payment and used
the other half to wash my clothes). It seems like terrible exploitation
now, but that was the way things were in those days. There was also
occasionally a bit of danger in dating German girls, especially if
their brothers had been killed in the war. There were one or two nasty
incidents near my base, I recall, and for a while we soldiers were
never allowed to go out into German towns for social purposes without
another soldier along for safety reasons. Most Germans were very friendly,
but a few were quite resentful, especially if they had suffered a
great deal because of the war and feeling helpless and discouraged
afterwards."
US-Soldaten und "Deutsche Fräuleins"
1947
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