Truemmerfrauen Lecture

Allied air raids on German cities left most of Germany in ruins by the end of World War II.  Most adult men were absent at the time, either not yet returned from the fighting abroad, or dead (estimates run as high as 15 million German men killed).

• Allied bombings (begun in 1942), left most of Germany's major cities in rubble.  The hardest hit cities were Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne.
• Some survivors worked to clear the rubble on their own, mostly to find usable materials to repair their own homes.  Though this was widespread, it came nowhere near to the demand----the streets were still jammed with rubble. 
• Women were called upon by the Allied Control Council to clear the streets of the rubble which in some places reached as high as the first floor.  These women, who were called "Truemmerfrauen" (literally "Rubble Women"), worked to clear the rubble from the streets, using bare hands and buckets.  They sorted the bricks recovered into two piles:  that which could be re-used, and that which could not.  The incentive for doing this work was that food ration coupons were upgraded for those who volunteered to the category of hard physical labor.  Higher caloric portions were given to women who did this hard task, much more so than the amount allotted to housewives.
• In Berlin alone, over 60,000 women worked to clear the rubble.
• In many present-day German cities where Truemmerfrauen worked for years (some well into the 1950s), there are now statues built to honor these womens' self-sacrifice and hard work.