thousand bricks; the lowest card, nicknamed the Friedhofskarte (cemetery ticket) was issued to housewives and the elderly. During this period, the average Berliner was around underweight. Alternative sources of food Due to the meagre rations, the black market thrived, and thousands traded on it daily. Payment was either in cigarettes or by bartering. There were even rumours of cannibalism and the . The word fringsen entered the German vocabulary during 1945, meaning to steal to survive. This word is etymologically based on the surname of Cardinal Josef Frings, a senior figure in the Catholic Church of Cologne, who (in accordance with long-standing Catholic tradition) famously gave his blessing to those who had to steal in order to feed their family. Der Elendswinter ("The miserable winter", 1945–46) The winter of 1945–46 was one of the coldest winters in Berlin. Temperatures plummeted to and there was no protection from the biting cold in the bombed-out houses. About 40,000 people suffered from hypothermia and 1,000 died as a result. The Berlin Magistrat (municipal authority) created official Wärmeräume (warm rooms) for people to warm themselves in. Crime In 1946, Berlin was a haven of crime. There were an average of 240 robberies and five murders a day, and most criminals were the destitute and homeless in Berlin. In the areas east of the future Oder-Neisse line, Red Army soldiers committed cruelties against the German population, including countless rapes. Western Allied soldiers sometimes harassed German civilians too. Problems with law and order occurred in the areas that had still been controlled by the Wehrmacht on May 8, 1945 (e.g. western Austria, Bavaria, South Tyrol (Italy), East Frisia and Schleswig-Holstein), the date of the final German surrender. Reconstruction and Stunde Null Also at the time of Stunde Null, Germany lay in ruins after the destruction wrought by World War Two. Following the war was a period of massive scale reconstruction. With roughly eighty percent of the country's infrastructure now in need of repair the German people saw an opportunity to reconstruct an old infrastructure into something more modern. They traded the condensed busy interiors of cities for newer, more expansive boulevards, opting to expand outward, creating more space to live in, rather than continuing the trend of condensing as they had done before. However, this project of reconstruction was and is still so great that the process of implementing the changes is not yet complete. This