Fanta and Nazi Germany

‘They had Fanta in the 1940s?’ I mumbled out loud as I was doing some research this week. I was descending into an ever-expanding warren of rabbit holes. The journey began with the perusal of the war diary of a German civilian, which I was combing for evidence as to whether he supported the Nazi regime or not. It ended with the fascinating discovery that many Germans drank Fanta down in their claustrophobic shelters while glass and brick shattered above their heads, and the system many of them had once supported writhed in its death struggle.

My diarist mentioned how his family and all the neighbours would spend days on end in the basement of their block of flats, which benefitted from some rudimentary fortification at least and appears to have kept them safe even when the building itself was hit by a bomb in February 1945. This got me thinking. He’d mentioned how tight rationing was towards the end of the war and how he’d had to go foraging in the woods for things like mushrooms (with which he managed to poison the entire family at one point). So, what exactly did one take down into the shelters?

Bottles of Fanta, apparently. The popular soft drink was not only widely available in Nazi Germany but had been invented there.