ABSTRACT
By the end of the war economic life in Germany seemed to have come to a complete halt. For Germany, the outcome of the Second World War was devastating: about eight million Germans killed or presumed dead, of whom three million were civilians. More than four million Germans were injured and there were still millions of ex-soldiers in prisoners of war camps. Large parts of the country were little more than heaps of rubble. Therefore, the housing situation was catastrophic: out of a total of 17.1 million about 3.4 million houses or flats had been destroyed and a further 30 per cent severely damaged. Refugees and expellees from the eastern parts of the former German Reich had difficulty finding housing.1 Apart from that the German transport system had been largely destroyed in the last months of the war. Consequently the German economy disintegrated into a number of regional sub-economies. A severe energy crisis, owing mainly to a shortage of coal, worsened the situation.
