Alternative Energy Sources for/by Civilians during WWII

[Patrick]

As difficult as it was for the Wehrmacht to obtain petrol, it must have been harder for a German civilian and worse yet for a civilian in the occupied territories. For that matter, the price of petrol (assuming it was even available) must also have been exorbitant for those living in Switzerland, Sweden, and Portugal.

I imagine that most civilians simply walked, rode bicycles (assuming tyres were available), rode horses, or took a train to get to where they were going, but I was curious whether civilians also coped with petrol shortages by developing alternative energy sources? I'm not talking about high tech efforts such as converting coal to oil, but low tech initiatives.

Thanks for any insight.

[phylo_roadking]

Patrick, there were many conversions available for private vehicles to run on a number of alternatives, most commonly "holzgas", a gas produced from wood. Not only civilian use was made of this and other alternative gases, the Wehrmacht used it to run training tanks in Germany, and there was even a prototype training Panther designed to run on it. If you use the search function here on "oil" you'll turn up quite a number of threads discussing how Germany replaced scarce POL (petrol,oil,lubricants) usually buried among discussion of the various campaigns Hitler did or did not kick off to obtain oil.

[sid guttridge]

Hi Guys,

Did Germany use gas bags on the top of vehicles, as occurred in the UK?

Cheers,

Sid.

[phylo_roadking]

Sid, both bags and rigid containers.

[phylo_roadking]

...but should say they also made more use of "live" producer systems than the British, who "cooked and stored"...the German "live" systems meant better fuel pumps and injectors were required, but this was a technology where the Germans were ahead of the british anyway.

[Marc Binazzi]

The system of gas generator on top of vehicles was used with Paris buses too.

http://www.ina.fr/voir_revoir/guerre/ph ... 14.fr.html

actually that system had been under trial since 1933 but gas shortage made it soar.

[gerhard2]

Hi Sid,
All I can remember most if not all our vehicles at the Ersatz Abteilung used holz gas. It looked funny with a boiler type tank about the size of two 45 gallon barrels usually just behind or aside the driver. On top of the cab there were always one or two bags of small bits of wood, dry wood. The size of about a match box. Every now and then the truck would stop and the driver get up on top, opened the top and stoked the glowing wood and adding a bit more wood and away he went. I did not think much about it at the time but think about it a trip to a lumber yard - why with a few bucks worth of off-cuts I could drive around for a week..
Patrick - you are right it was difficult to get gasoline, even for my motorbike it was hard. Often I had to borrow a horse and cart to go from our battery HQ to the launch pads. My main source were shot up cars and trucks where I could syphon a few drops of gasoline. Why one time I even swiped a tank full from Dietrich's car.
Gerhard