When QA Lorna Bradey was posted to Germany in 1947, she too felt dazed by the level of suffering and humiliation she encountered. Lorna was sent to the British Military Hospital at Wuppertal.
The stench of decay as we drove through the town was unimaginable. With dismay I saw total destruction around … I could read the hate on the people’s white drawn faces. Some spat at us.
As winter approached hunger eclipsed every other need:
The Germans would do anything for food and stealing was rife … The shops were boarded up and empty; only the ruins and dejected people creeping about … One felt helpless – the conquered race.
Later, posted to another military hospital at Spandau outside Berlin, Lorna herself went hungry after the Soviet powers severed communications into the city. British, French and Americans organising the Berlin airlift (‘Operation Victuals’) were drawn together in adversity. Staff and patients alike kept warm by burning scavenged firewood, and food was short. The hospital admitted all patients except Russians. For Lorna, it was ‘a strangely happy time’, when, undeterred by international tensions, the nurses’ off-duty hours were spent dancing at the French club at Lake Wannsee – ‘tightening our belts’.
Humanity is not exclusive to women, nor were they all insensible to the sweet taste of victory. But the artist Frances Faviell was another young woman, like Lorna Bradey and Anne Popham, whose time in post-war Germany caused her to ponder the relationship between victor and vanquished, as well as between men and women. Frances had experienced the worst that the London Blitz could throw at her; being lowered into a bomb crater to bring help to a horribly mutilated victim was an experience that remained indelibly engraved on her memory. And she and her husband, Richard, had nearly been buried alive under the ruins of their flat. In 1941 their son John was born. Now, in the autumn of 1946, the Parker family decamped to Berlin.
Eighteen months earlier, in April 1945, Berlin had been pounded by Russian bombs. Civilians who tried to surrender or escape from inevitable doom were rounded up by the SS and hanged from lamp- posts. The Russian army entered the city. Out of control, its soldiers looted every item of property they could lay hands on, then, like animals, rampaged through the streets looking for women. It is estimated that up to 130,000 women were raped in Berlin in 1945. Frances had last visited Germany’s capital in 1938. Half of it now lay in dust:
The complete and utter devastation of Berlin had shaken me profoundly. Nothing … had prepared one for the dead horror of this city.
In 1946, Richard Parker’s job was to assist in implementing reconstruction and reparations in the British zone; meanwhile, Frances helped out at the improvised school set up for the children of the occupying troops. She employed an attractive but reserved young German woman named Lotte to look after five-year-old John in her absence. One afternoon she returned to find Lotte reading aloud to the little boy, who was miserable with a heavy cold. Touched by the young woman’s intimate heed for him, Frances made an effort to draw her into conversation. What had it been like, she asked Lotte, that April, before the capitulation? ‘For answer she fetched her diary for the months of April and May 1945.’
Frances sat down to read. The pages covered the dreadful final days of the Reich, that time of rumours, broadcasts and aching fear, when the people of Berlin began to realise that the war would be lost. Lotte described how she had hidden in a dark cellar, listening to the awful bombardment, emerging only to forage for food. Horrors piled up. The soldiers – ‘filthy Mongol troops’ – were more like murderers and bandits than military men. Filled with rage and malevolence against the German race, they had found Lotte and raped her, ‘not once … but time after time’. She was one among the thousands of women, from young girls to grandmothers, who were seized and drunkenly forced into sex:
women with their children clinging in terror to their skirts, and young women held by one man while another took his pleasure … Every date and detail was set down in pencil – she had written it by the light of her torch.
It was one of the most horrible documents I had ever read, and I felt icy cold as I put it down.
A barrier broken between them, Frances now persuaded Lotte to talk more about her brutal ordeal. Further horrors emerged; she trembled violently and went white. Time would surely dull the pain, suggested Frances, even if it could never erase the experience. There was a chilling dignity in Lotte’s reply: ‘What does it matter what happened to me – we have lost the war!’
Lotte’s brief story, which first appeared in print in Frances Faviell’s 1954 memoir about her time in Berlin, offers a glimpse of the dreadful sufferings of Germany’s female civilians. The following year the world was presented with a fuller female perspective on the sack of the city, when A Woman in Berlin, the anonymous diary of a woman journalist, covering the same period from April to June 1945, was first published in Britain. The diarist, an educated and liberal thirty-four-year-old, reflected on the collapse of Nazism as Zhukov’s army rolled towards the capital:
These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men – and the feelings of all the other women – are changing. We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world – ruled by men, glorifying the strong man – is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of ‘Man’. In earlier wars men could claim that the privilege of killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today, we women, too, have a share. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.
This German woman, experiencing the collapse of the Nazi edifice at first hand, put into words a deep truth about the wider world of men. They were addicted to control and domination, enslaved to the wielding of weapons; as Virginia Woolf had written, there was ‘a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men’. Without their guns and jackboots, they were left impotent and emasculated, supplicants and beggars.
But if she hoped that the demise of Nazism also spelled an end to male brutality, disillusionment was to be rapid. The day after she wrote that entry the Russians arrived in Berlin. Two soldiers lay in wait for her, tore off her underclothes, and forced her to the ground. Over the next two months there would be more; she only survived to tell the tale through a combination of astuteness, luck and intelligent instinct.
Thus, as this diary shows and as the appalled and awestruck Frances Parker discovered from Lotte’s trembling confession, the onslaught of the victorious nations was accompanied by a wave of unprecedented violence against women. It was as if the war’s calamitous endgame demanded a reassertion by men of their former ascendancy, an implacable conquest by the phallus. Lest war prove too liberating, too emancipating for women, they must be suppressed, subjugated and quelled to the last gasp.
Berlin in extremis illustrates the destruction of a male paradigm, as the German Reich imploded; but it also exposes with horrifying clarity the regeneration of violence, brutality and cruelty among men hell-bent on regaining sexual control. In Germany, the publication of the anonymous woman’s diary would prove controversial in a nation deeply disturbed by the rapes. The book was denounced as a slur on German womankind; their men felt compromised and shamed, and the subject of the mass rapes remained largely taboo. Male authority was to rest largely unchallenged until another generation of women took their protest on to the streets twenty-five years later.
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The temperature was dropping. By the time Phyllis Noble returned to have her social work interview at the end of January, Tavistock Square was covered in a blanket of snow. It was the beginning of Britain’s worst winter in over fifty years.
Across the country the freeze had set in, a relentless north-east wind was blowing, and blizzards were making headlines: ‘MORE CONTINUOUS SNOW; UNBROKEN FROST – COLDEST FEBRUARY DAY FOR YEARS; COLD SPELL TO CONTINUE – FIFTEEN DAYS WITHOUT SUNSHINE’. The sea froze at Margate and icebergs w
ere seen off the Norfolk coast. As if austerity hadn’t taken a severe enough toll on the country already, Britain now had to face serious crises in transport, fuel and food supply.
Maggie Joy Blunt went shopping in Windsor: ‘it was really frightful, just made you want to curl up & die’. Back in her cottage in Slough, she relit the kitchen fire and started to thaw out, but decided not to take her coat off.
‘Well, what’s the decision – a fire now, or plum jam next summer?’ Winter 1947: a new ice age.
February 1st 1947
In the bedroom … the water in washstand jug has frozen solid, right to the bottom.
I am wearing thick woollen vest, rubber roll-on, wool pantees, stockings, thick long-sleeved wool sweater, slacks, jackets, scarf & 2 pairs woollen socks – & am just about comfortable.
February 24th
Last night the coldest we’ve had – I could feel my nose freezing in bed.
Though the miners went into overdrive to produce more fuel, frozen pitheads and disrupted coal distribution affected supply. Restrictions were enforced and hardship stories abounded; the nation shivered as electricity was cut off for five hours in every twenty-four, and it began to feel like a return to the blackout. Radio programmes were suspended, newspapers reduced in size, and people had to go for brisk walks, stand about in shops or go to bed in order not to freeze. Upper-class families who felt kitchen life to be beneath their dignity were forced to swallow their pride; it was the only warm room in the house. The government applied a stern utility ethos to consumption regarded as wasteful. Bakers were prohibited from making jam puffs; anyone wanting a wedding cake must apply for a permit. For families with babies washing and drying nappies was a nightmare, but there was an unexpected dimension to the crisis when thousands of them found that their newborn infants could not be christened, and would have to wait, nameless, until the snow thawed around cut-off churches. The Daily Mirror offered suggestions for do-it-yourself baptisms, but advised ‘if you are in doubt, send for the parson’.
Margaret Herbertson, who had pursued her dream of an Oxford education once the war was over, was there studying for a Diploma in Social Studies that winter. Getting to lectures down the Iffley Road was fraught with peril, as her bicycle skidded and she lived in fear of falling off in the path of an oncoming bus.
I used to walk down to the Bodleian Library to keep warm. But everyone had had the same idea, and there weren’t enough chairs, so I used to sit on the floor and work.
The Thames iced up, and Port Meadow flooded and then froze, so people skated. It was very picturesque – but it was hellish actually.
Thrifty Nella Last reverted straight back into wartime mode and took to cooking all her husband’s meals on the hob of the dining-room fire. News of the electricity cuts made her all the more determined to bake and hoard what she could. On the night of 26 February she lay awake and listened to ‘the heavy swish of snow’. In the morning drifts lay mounded up to the top of the garden fence at 9 Ilkley Road. Will Last took the broom and shovel to dig his way out to the bus stop. On 7 March another storm came in. It froze. A week later there were yet more heavy falls on top of the packed ice. Down town, cold, angry women stood in queues in inadequate footwear.
Maggie Joy Blunt struggled to be thankful for her warm clothes and rubber bootees, but she was not alone in finding the winter of 1947 the most trying time in living memory. ‘Grumbles on every side,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘A bitter time & with the bad weather, to many it seems “worse than the war”.’
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Frances Faviell’s account of that winter in Berlin makes British hardship seem light by comparison. Despite the non-fraternisation rules imposed on the British, she was in a position both to observe and alleviate the dreadful sufferings of Germany’s defeated capital.
Berliners told each other that the Russians had brought their Siberian winter with them. ‘One went to bed with the two words, Cold, Hunger, ringing in one’s ears, and awoke to them again in the morning.’ Frances saw children tearing at each other, fighting for the scraps in Allied dustbins, their limbs chapped and chilblained. The city was horrified to hear of a train arriving at the British zonal frontier carrying sixteen corpses. They were German people being repatriated from Poland who had died of cold en route. The only currency that would purchase food was cigarettes, and there was only one way – for a young or pretty woman – to earn cigarettes.
The British, Russian and American occupiers had their own supplies, and seemed to feel no scruples about giving lavish dances and dinners. Frances felt agonised by the uninhibited consumption that went on at such events. Wasn’t there something hideous about putting on evening dress and dinner suits to attend them in a city that was starving? One night, when the temperature was at nearly its lowest point that winter, the Russians invited representatives of all the other powers to a ball in the Allied Control Administration building. Bands played; there were mountains of food and endless drink, served by ranks of young German waitresses in white cotton gloves. The glittering rooms were filled with banks of hothouse flowers. Frances looked around her, staggered. How could she dance, knowing that the cost of the flowers alone would have fed the waitresses and all their families? Just the fuel needed to grow those perfumed lilies could have saved hundreds of lives. In the early hours Richard and Frances escaped. Outside in the biting cold an ancient man with a piece of sacking tied round his head was stumbling around looking for discarded cigarette butts, the image of loss. ‘The snow gave an air of death to everything, as if the ball, still going on in the brilliantly lighted building, was a pavane for the dead of this ghost-haunted city.’
Next morning, walking in the Grunewald, Frances found a frozen body under a bush, dark-blue in colour, and absolutely stiff. By 6 January the thermometer had dropped again to minus thirty-six degrees Celsius. Daily, corpses of frozen children were being brought into the Kinderklinik. The non-fraternisation rules were relaxed where children were concerned, and Frances visited the clinic to see for herself. The doctors there were desperate for penicillin, bandages, clothes and blankets for the children. Frances did what she could, writing to the Daily Telegraph appealing for help, and was moved at the generosity of hundreds of British women who responded with parcels of baby clothes and other supplies. At home too, nobody was turned away without a piece of bread and a cup of the soup that Lotte now kept permanently simmering on the stove. But despair ate at her:
Death, death, death! It was nothing else. I hated the snow. It carried for me the dirge of all that is gay, coloured and vital. It brought in its white shroud the winding sheet for thousands that winter. I wanted to go home – back to London – it was almost as cold there, but people were not dying of hunger.
Frances Faviell learned much during her time in Berlin. In her memoir of that period she wrote about the terrible face of defeat, about the responsibilities that victory brought with it, and about our common humanity. Her determination to persist in befriending the ruined Germans also brought her up against some deeply uncomfortable truths regarding sex roles in the shattered Nazi state. Frances had become close to a Berlin family named the Altmanns. Frau Altmann, deeply religious and conventional, was principally concerned for her menfolk: of her two sons one was missing in Russia after Stalingrad, the other was a wastrel who had switched allegiance from the Hitler Youth to the Communists. Once prosperous, their stocks and shares had all gone, and her frail and elderly husband could no longer work.
The couple now unwittingly owed their lives to their daughters. The elder one, Ursula, brought in money and food through prostitution and the black market; she too had been raped by the Russians. Lilli, the younger, was a ballerina at the Staatsoper. But in the depths of January Herr Altmann died of cold and heart failure. Frau Altmann, numbed with grief, could not see that her daughters were also vulnerable. As young women their duty, in her eyes, was to their father and brothers. ‘German women are brought up to worship the male members of the family.’ In Frau Altmann’
s world, no man ever helped in the house, and he had the first call on every comfort. She fatally neglected her daughters, failing to notice their hollow-eyed hunger, unobservant of Lilli’s pallor and ill-health. And soon after the death of her father, Lilli too died, weak and starving as she was, from a botched abortion; the father of her unborn child had been a Russian officer.
Frances pondered the need of German women to hero-worship the supreme male. Wasn’t it a short but inevitable step for pre-war hausfraus like Frau Altmann - who unhesitatingly deferred to and idolised their menfolk – into the condoning of Nazism? Women who believed that their role was to be abject and submissive must surely share the responsibility for Fascism. She also noted – in Lotte and her other servant Gisela – an unquestioning observance of authority that unnerved her. Lotte’s comment on the hanging of the Nazi war criminals absolved them of responsibility: ‘The men had only been doing what they had been ordered to do,’ she said. Lotte, like all Germans under instruction, carried out her orders to the letter. It amounted to a pitiless streak.
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