STRUGGLES FOR SAUSAGES IN BERLIN.

Waikato Times, Volume 87, Issue 13269, 26 August 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

STRUGGLES FOR SAUSAGES IN BERLIN.

Evidences multiply of troubles occasioned by the shortage of food supplies in Berlin. A disturbance occurred on Saturday in front of a butcher's shop in Tegeler Weg. Some time ago the butcher sold to an old customer whose sons are at the front some bacon, which she came to take away on Saturday evening. She laid the bacon in a laundry basket, and covered it with the washing." Scarcely had she reached the street when she was waylaid by several women, who subjected the basket to close examination. When they discovered the bacon there was general exasperation and a threatening attitude towards the butcher. The police were obliged to intervene and made three arrests. On Sunday a butcher's wife with her two maids tried to take 601b to 701b of sausage, of the kind known as black pudding in England, to the Red Cross kitchen in Tilsit street. She had scarcely started witli her companions when a crowd of about 100 persons assailed her and overturned the laundry basket containing the sausage. Part of the sausage was etolen and the rest trampled under foot, the butcher's wife being pelted with the fragments. Another case is that of a dealer in Steglitz street, on whose premises 14cwt of foreign sausage was confiscated, having gone bad. Thieves broke into the shop on Saturday * night and stele several hundred-weight. A guard was posted hefore the shop on Sunday morning, but while it was withdrawn for a moment to attend to another matter the shop, which in consequence of the burglary was accessible from the street, was entered by several persons, who took most of the remaining sausage. Some of the offenders were arrested and imprisoned. Report says that the remainder have only themselves to blame if they are ill after consuming the sausage, which a food inspector had declared to be in a high degree .rancid and condemned to destruction. A report that many tons of meat and sausage were stored on the premises of a firm in the Wilhelmn-Strasse attracted many thousands of people to that street on Saturday. Altogether only one ton of such wares was found .there;. and only about 1200 persona could be supplied.