Broken Lives

by Konrad H Jarausch

  After getting his documents in order, the returned POWs might experience a few days of fleeting liberty without immediate responsibilities. At last “we felt free” from the years of Nazi pressure, while the end of imprisonment allowed “us gradually to find ourselves,” Horst Johannsen recalled. “But what a great error!” While trying to resume his earlier job, he was requisitioned by the Soviet-installed authorities for “slave labor” although he was neither a war criminal nor a political detainee. “Now a former farm worker, made mayor by the caprice of the Communists, dictated compulsion and repression again.” First Johannsen was ordered to take down “all overhead wires” for the second train track at Weissenfels; then he was assigned to disassemble the huge excavator of an open-pit lignite mine. While it was understandable that manpower was needed for reconstruction tasks, the dismantling of East German industries for shipping to the Soviet Union hardly endeared the Russians to those workers who were trying to rebuild them.26

  In order to put food on the table, the returned soldiers had to find temporary jobs without insisting on resuming their prior careers. “Through dismantling and lack of raw materials the economy was in bad shape,” and many firms where they had worked had been forced out of business. Hence Paul Frenzel had no choice but to work as a waiter in his father’s railroad-station restaurant, acting more as a “house servant and errand boy” than a trained merchant. Younger men who had gone to war without finishing their educations had an even harder time. Glad to find employment at all, Erich Helmer decided to “go to the railroad,” doing physical labor as a maintenance worker. His rationale was that “If we want to survive, we have to help rebuild” the country. Hermann Debus was fortunate enough to be rehired on a tugboat on the Rhine, but this work was now dangerous because the river was clogged with sunken ships and pieces of broken bridges. Even returnees who wanted to study at a university, such as Heinz Schultheis, had to do “work which helped the reconstruction of Germany” as a condition of admission.27

  Sometimes a Nazi past would catch up with a jobseeker and ruin the best-laid plans. In order to hide his SS membership, Rolf Bulwin cut the incriminating blood tattoo from his arm, leaving a scar. On the advice of a friend, he hired on with the local police force in the small town of Königsee in Thuringia while hiding his prior activities. Everything seemed to be going well when he was suddenly ordered to report to the mayor. This official had just gotten the news that Rolf had been an HJ leader and SS member and could no longer tolerate him in the force in the Russian sector. He told Bulwin, “To be true, I am a Communist, but first of all a German,” and warned him, “you have three days’ time” to leave for the West. Frantically, the Bulwins and their daughter crossed the zonal border on foot, registered at the transit camp Friedland, and made their way to Celle, where Ruth’s father was. With their dreams of security shattered, they had to live at one end of a horse stable while Bulwin started over as tractor driver for a tree nursery.28

  Both remaining civilians and returning soldiers had to face scrutiny of their political involvement in the Third Reich. During his homecoming, Erich Helmer had to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about his affiliations, which he had no difficulty completing due to his anti-Fascist attitude. With the help of denunciations “about the brutal Nazi behavior and machinations of the Gestapo and Hitler’s Bodyguard,” the Americans “even went after old Nazis in their former offices, schools, and the bureaucracy.” In the Russian zone, “old Communists suddenly appeared who thought their hour had come,” Horst Johannsen recalled. “Now it was their turn to catalogue people from the Nazi period as accomplices or perpetrators. Hence a new wave of arrests and secret detentions began” with the help of the Soviet secret service. As a result, the death sentences of the Nuremberg Trials remained rather controversial: “Who gave the victors the right, to judge like gods, although they themselves had killed and murdered without scruples?”29

  Already in the POW camps and then at home, a process of collective soul-searching began that tried to find explanations for the Nazi catastrophe. Unregenerate nationalists tended to blame the allies and members of the resistance, reviving “old enemy images” such as “the capitalists, world Jewry or the Communists.” Many military officers held Hitler’s arrogance and incompetence responsible for strategic errors, attributing the defeat to his “loss of realism” in taking on the entire globe. Gradually a minority, like Martin Sieg, “realized that one man together with his minions had engulfed half a world in flames, destruction, and death by unleashing a global catastrophe with his belief in ideology and enormous power.” But taking the next step and admitting their own participation in Nazi crimes was psychologically difficult for most defeated Germans, even if ultimately “there was no escape from it.” It was easier to assuage one’s conscience, as Hans-Harald Schirmer did, by claiming “We knew nothing about the special annihilation camps with their gas chambers and crematoria for the murder of the 4.5 or 6 million Jews.”30

  The war ended for Germans at rather different times depending on their age and gender, and sheer luck. The first civilians to be liberated in October 1944 were the inhabitants of Aachen. It took half a year longer for the rest to escape the final struggle through the capitulation in May 1945. The Wehrmacht’s surrender created about ten million POWs who were only gradually released, with the last survivors leaving Russia in 1955. During his lengthy period of captivity, Karl Härtel complained bitterly, “Whenever I hear that many young men are already home or were never away, anger grips me and something rises up within me, I feel resentment against a fate that knows no justice.” Speaking for many desperate POWs, he continued. “We have risked our lives and have the pleasure of being imprisoned, while others strut about at home, enjoy themselves, and perhaps laugh at us.” Though the prolonged captivity was necessary to atone for Nazi crimes and rebuild destroyed countries, it broke bodies and minds and made it difficult for many Germans to face their own responsibility.31

  HOUR OF THE WOMEN

  The collapse of the Third Reich into postwar chaos was the “hour of the women” because they had to tidy up the mess their menfolk had created. Not only had several million young men died in the Wehrmacht, but millions of others were absent as POWs. Therefore the challenge of assuring daily survival amid the ruins or on the refugee treks fell largely on female shoulders. This new responsibility sometimes made women stronger. Joachim Fest’s sister related, “In the one and a half years of my father’s absence our sensitive mother had turned into a robust person,” completely shedding her gentility. “Without any ceremony she had taken charge of the building, issued instructions to the occupants, conducted tough negotiations on the black market and traveled into the countryside on roofs of the suburban trains to get hold of a handful of potatoes, a cabbage or a paper bag of wrinkled winter apples.”32 This surprising strength, enshrined in the popular image of the “rubble women,” showed a female capacity for action that had been suppressed by the heavy hand of patriarchy.

  In dealing with the occupying armies in 1945, women had both advantages and disadvantages. The Allies feared male Werewolf guerilla resistance, but females were assumed not to pose any security threat. Because they were largely focused on the private domain, they also did not protest against the victors’ policies such as the dismantling of industries. As their networks of solidarity remained personal, they escaped Allied control of public life. But the many stories of rape were not just mere revanchist fabrication, especially because they also mention sexual depredations by French and American soldiers. Moreover, females were helpless when victorious troops burst into their homes to plunder valuables or to wreck the furniture just for the fun of it. Especially galling was the quartering of occupation troops in their houses. In coping with Russian soldiers, Ursula Baehrenburg found that “joy and suffering were always distributed equally.”33 Everything therefore depended upon how the gendered relations between victors and vanquished were managed.

  In the Western zones, the initial ban on fra
ternization between soldiers and German Fräuleins quickly broke down, for both sides longed for company. To maintain distance from the defeated enemy, the US Army had forbidden relations with German women, portraying them as a source of venereal disease with a caricature called “Veronika Dankeschön.” But with thousands of youths of both sexes looking for diversion, GIs and girls quickly found ways to circumvent the ban. These attachments developed partly for material reasons—the victors offered access to coffee, chocolate, and cigarettes—and partly out of genuine feeling for each other. As a result of a wave of petitions, the army lifted the ban on “German brides” in December 1946 and allowed GIs to marry and bring their spouses back to the United States. Because of segregation, unions between black soldiers and white girls required the permission of an American officer, which was often denied for racist reasons. Returning POWs also resented fraternizing females and referred to them as “Ami whores.”34

  By contrast, in the Soviet zone relations between the victors and the defeated remained tense. Especially in areas initially occupied by the Americans, the arrival of the Red Army was greeted with “great resentment and continual fear of depredations,” hardly conducive to cordial interaction. Beyond the expected plunder of jewelry, watches, cameras, and bicycles, “the population continued to be held in fear and terror by the brutal assaults upon women and girls by members of the Red Army.” Horst Johannsen remembered that when “they had gotten hold of alcohol for their always thirsty throats, one was well advised to get away in time.” Individual Russian soldiers could be kind and sentimental, as Ursula Baehrenburg found out when she befriended amiable youths called Sascha or Nikolai. But as a collective they were unpredictable, with moods swinging widely between generosity and cruelty. In some instances, liberated Poles or Czechs behaved even more brutally, so that, ironically, harassed women sometimes asked Russian authorities for protection.35

  In the Eastern territories assigned to Russian and Polish administration, the power relations were suddenly reversed: former servants became the new masters and sought to obliterate all signs of prior German ownership. Returning refugees became “strangers in their own land.” Glad to be alive at all, Silesians such as Erika Scholz-Eule and her sister Traudel “did not want to leave, not only for themselves but also for Germany.” But when they were evicted from their homes, expelled from their jobs, and deprived of their citizenship, they could only stay on as a new underclass. With more and more displaced Poles from the East arriving daily, Ursula Baehrenburg noted that “the German farmers now had to work as laborers and servants on the farms which they had inherited for generations.” The former inhabitants tried desperately to hang on by slaving in the fields, laboring as masons, and so on. They now found out what it meant to live under foreign rule in “a state of complete lawlessness.”36

  Try as they might, in the long run the defeated Germans could not prevent their systematic expulsion from their former homes. When a drunken Pole started to undo her clothes to rape her, seventeen-year-old Ursula Baehrenburg “resolved to get away from this hour on.” She sewed backpacks from sacks and persuaded her reluctant father to get the required exit permit. Since they “could hardly take anything along” beyond food, “irreplaceable valuables remained behind. Everything that my parents had built in laborious work was gone.” On the way to the station, her father put a bag over his head in order to be spared the sight of what he was losing. In the next town, they joined a “transport for Germans leaving” East Prussia, only to be crammed into cattle cars. “Full of fear,” they huddled during the long journey in the unheated wagons, hearing cries for help when another car was ransacked during a halt. In Stettin, the expellees rushed the train to the West; all had only one thought: “to depart, to be saved.”37 One such photo shows expellees emerging from the same kind of cattle cars that had shipped Jews before (image 21).

  Similarly, the “shadow existence” of Germans under Polish authority in Silesia could not last; the occupiers wanted the land cleared for their own citizens who had been expelled by Stalin further East. With no news but rumors, the remaining Germans had no idea that they were to be transferred in an “orderly and humane manner” to the West according to the Potsdam Agreement. But they did notice that “revenge was the order of the day” through constant humiliation and hunger. Still dressed as a boy and recovering from typhoid fever, sixteen-year-old Ursula Mahlendorf had the good fortune to be able to work as an assistant nurse; this provided her with official papers allowing her to remain. In long hikes in the countryside she helped to distribute medical supplies to needy Germans hidden from the Polish militia. Though she had learned some of the language, she could not avoid expulsion in the summer of 1946. All the Germans of Strehlen were loaded into an otherwise empty freight train and sent to the West. Even then, Mahlendorf “knew with amazing clarity: We would never return.”38

  Polish policy toward the remaining Germans was contradictory: Warsaw wanted to clear Silesia to make room for settlers from the East, but forbade competent specialists to leave. In the chaotic transition, the Germans, identified by white armbands, lost their possessions, houses, food, and work. “Systematically we were deprived of any possibility to live.” In May of 1946 Ruth Weigelt’s family finally managed to join the deportees in cattle cars to the West in order “to live as Germans in Germany.” They were first processed in the Friedland transition camp, then temporarily settled in Lower Saxony. Ruth herself remained behind because, as coal miners, her in-laws and returned POW husband were considered essential workers and were forbidden to leave. Because “we were stuck,” they decided “to arrange themselves with the new occupiers” by learning Polish and making friends through music. Things gradually improved. Then, in 1957, they obtained permission to depart as Spätaussiedler, or repatriates. Weigelt wrote of that time, “On the one hand, we were happy finally to be able to leave; on the other, it was clear that we had lost our home and would never get it back.”39

  21. Expulsion from Silesia. © Gerhard Gronefeld / Deutsches Historisches Museum.

  Germans in the Sudetenland faced discrimination by the Czechs and eventual ejection as well. As long as their labor was needed, farmers were allowed to bring in the harvest, but thereafter “mass evictions began in the villages.” Twenty-three-year-old former POW Hans Tausch was arrested, imprisoned, beaten, and accused of being “a Nazi pig” without discernable cause. Because of such nationalist reprisals, “it was clear to my relatives and me that under the present circumstances remaining in our home was not only unimaginable but dangerous.” Not waiting for their formal expulsion, the Tauschs moved some of their possessions over the lightly patrolled border to Franconia. With an official permit, they drove their remaining property minus two confiscated violins to Bavaria on December 8, 1945. Tausch’s parents were distraught and “looked back, tears in their eves; they never saw their homeland again.” Crossing the frontier “meant a caesura in my life, which initiated developments of decisive importance for my future.”40 Although the Czechs had suffered less than the Poles, their vindictiveness was even greater.

  Even after arriving in Germany, the trials of the expellees were far from over. Their receiving communities resented them as a drain on scarce resources. Upon disembarking from the trains, they were processed in relocation facilities such as Friedland, deloused, registered, and fed. If they had relatives, they were encouraged to go immediately to join them; if not, they were put into refugee camps, where they could barely survive. Christel Groschek had to move from employer to employer in order to escape unwanted sexual advances. Ursula Mahlendorf found herself in an abandoned airfield outside Delmenhorst with insufficient food and lack of heat. Only by appealing to the liberal minister of education, Marie Elisabeth Lüders, was she finally accepted by a high school in Bremen. More galling yet was the “distrust” of the local population, who treated the newcomers as “homeless beggars and vagrants.” Feeling resented, belonging to a different denomination, and being “poor as church-mice” did no
t exactly help the refugees to come to terms with their displacement. But their resolute determination to pitch in gradually earned them respect.41

  In the devastated cities, the rebuilding began with removal of the rubble. This was accomplished largely by female labor without machinery. Male Nazis who were classified as collaborators (Mitläufer) by denazification courts were often sentenced to clear the streets as a form of community service. According to Ingrid Bork, every person or “pupil who wanted to work or go to school in Bremen” had to show “a certificate of voluntary labor” in order to be able to enroll. “We all complied without grumbling, since we were glad that the war was over.” But postwar photographs show that it was mostly women wearing pants, rough shirts, boots, and headscarves who shoveled the debris onto trucks. Erika Taubhorn remembered, “Many women chipped mortar from the bricks so that these could again be used for rebuilding.”42 Responding to the shortage of workers, women at this time also took over other jobs once held mainly by men, such as baking bread and running streetcars.

  Due to the inadequate food supply, many urban Germans starved during the immediate postwar years. During the final struggle, production had plummeted while the loss of agricultural territories and lack of transportation inhibited distribution. Robert Neumaier recalled that “hunger was our daily companion; all our thinking only revolved around eating.” Inefficient and gendered by favoring physical labor, the rationing system offered only about half of the daily minimum of nutrition. This endangered everyone, but especially the old and infants. Mothers, who were doing most of the cooking, stretched traditional recipes and ordered their older children to collect wild berries, mushrooms, fruit from roadside trees, dandelion greens—anything that might be edible. Horst Johannsen recalled gleaning fields for leftover kernels of wheat that could be milled into flour. Other families used their garden plots to grow potatoes, greens, and beets to supplement their meager rations. Nonetheless, Ursula Baehrenburg remembered, “Often hunger tormented me at night so that I could not sleep.”43