Even when Stettin fell, the Kardorffs stayed put. They hoped that it would be the English that conquered them: ‘gentlemanly types, and sort of cousins’. Long lines of refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania passed the gates and, despite the implorings of relations, they would not budge. Then one May morning the Cossacks appeared on the horizon: ‘they came en masse, with tanks, on motorbikes, on foot, on horseback, even on sleighs drawn by teams of four dogs’. They fell on the wine cellar, so prudently preserved; then the destruction began, of furniture and pictures. Aunt May and Uncle Willi committed suicide. As May put it to Ina, ‘The Kardorffs have been at home here for five hundred years, what could we do elsewhere? I think God will have mercy on us.’ Ursula’s uncle Egon, former commander of a cavalry regiment, saw the bodies in the wood and went to Ina: ‘Now I will have to leave you alone. I can’t bear a life like this, and I have no fear of death.’ He went to his parents’ grave in the wood, where Ursula’s father was also buried, and took poison.
Ursula’s mother was now on her own. She packed some things in a rucksack and walked. In the local villages the same scene repeated itself: drunken soldiers, dead nobles. A woman had shot fifteen members of her family single-handed then drowned herself. Ina von Kardorff was robbed of her watch and her last possessions. In a small town she was given lodging by some artisans and a pastor’s wife until she was ordered to leave again.
She arrived in Güstrow, and found an attic room with a baker’s wife. She painted pictures and gave drawing lessons, sewed and embroidered. She even helped a painter do a portrait of Stalin. All around her were the sick and dying, and disease. At night houses were searched and she heard the screams of women, followed by shots. In the church on Sundays the pastor announced long lists of the dead. She spoke to Ursula of Russians, too, some of whom were good and generous, and gave things to the people. Some even went to church.177
Werewolves
Underground resistance to the occupation either petered out quickly or failed to materialise at all. The Werewolves, who had been formed in October 1944 to make life impossible for the Allies, committed the odd dastardly deed such as the murder of the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff, carried out by two men dressed as paratroopers in March 1945. After that, they fizzled out. The killing of Oppenhof remains controversial: Goebbels was naturally pleased, and described the men as partisans, but his lack of prior knowledge would suggest that the mayor was not killed by direct orders from Berlin. Others have stated that he was killed as a rendement de compte of mere local significance.178 It might instead have been the work of an SS hit-squad rather than Werewolves. In Austria, Franz Fehrer had been given the job of training Werewolves in Wiener Neustadt, but as foreign troops crossed Austria’s borders the Gauleiter, Eigruber, gave orders to discontinue the training and not to attack the American forces. The American OSS came to the conclusion that there were no more active cells of Werewolves in Austria in July 1945.179 Carl Zuckmayer claimed that the spirit of the Werewolves collapsed at the same time as Germany, and not a trace remained. Certainly Lucius Clay could find no trace of anyone trying to form a ‘Nazi underground’ in early July 1945.180
There were, however, some very isolated incidents. In Glowitz in Pomerania a forester called Drambusch, a fanatical Nazi, withdrew to the forest where he built himself a bothy and planned to recruit others in his fight against the conquerors. No one listened and later the Russians tracked him down and shot him. He died of his wounds soon after in Stolp.181 Goebbels had made a loud noise about German resistance and there was still a jittery feeling about Werewolves in May, which the Russians used as an excuse to slaughter any young men they found. The Czechs were even less kind than the Russians. Dr E. Siegel heard about the arrival in the Little Fortress of Theresienstadt (now Terezin in the Czech Republic) of twenty-one men branded Werewolves. They were stood against the wall. During the night the doctor heard the usual screams and cracking of whips. Later he heard that prisoners had cleared the gatehouse of blood, brains, teeth and hair and had to scatter fresh sand. The men were officially listed as ‘dead on arrival’.182
Accusing someone of being a Werewolf could seal his or her fate, and there must have been many cases where individuals sought revenge in this way. In Dalliendorf in Mecklenburg in the SBZ (the Soviet Zone, or Sowjetische Besatzungszone), twenty-six-year-old Paul Schröder had emerged from concentration camp wearing the green triangle of a criminal, but he quickly converted his record to make out that he was a former member of the Communist Party. He told the authorities that a Frau Westphal, the owner of an estate in the village, together with two men called Holst and Redicke, were Werewolves. All three were shot on 2 July 1945. When it transpired that Schröder had been lying, he too was shot.183
There was a little bravado at the beginning when battle-hardened soldiers observed the punier members of the Allied armies and imagined how easy it might be to overpower them.184 In general, however, the Allied soldiers were more a danger to themselves, as the writer James Stern, an Englishman in an American uniform, discovered when he chanced on an American cemetery on the way home from Bamberg to Nuremberg in the summer of 1945. The war had been over for two months, but the caretaker told him that bodies came in at an average of thirteen a day. Stern was incredulous, but it seemed that drunken and reckless driving was the chief cause, together with suicide.185
Illustrious Bones
The arrival of the Allies, the Red Army in particular, had initiated a series of bizarre journeys - bones were shifted from ancient vaults to escape desecration. The first to go were of comparatively recent date: those of Hindenburg and his wife, who had been laid to rest in the Tannenberg Monument in 1934.al The retreating German army exhumed Hindenburg’s corpse in January 1945 and blew up the monument before they left. The corpses were conveyed across the Baltic on the cruiser Emden.
Once landed, the Hindenburgs’ remains were driven to Potsdam, and stored in Luftwaffe HQ Kurfürst in Wildpark near by. They joined the royal refugees that had been extracted from the vault under the Garrison Church: Frederick the Great and his austere father, Frederick William I, who had been taken from the crypt by candlelight one night in February. At the same time Wehrmacht officers had removed all the captured standards. The Garrison Church was destroyed on 14 April 1945, and the bodies escaped the bombing and subsequent firestorm as a result.186
By the time of the Allied raid, the Hindenburgs, Frederick William and Frederick had already left Potsdam.am On Sunday 11 March Hauptmann Wilfried Seegebarth received orders to take them to a salt mine in Thuringia along with the standards and other precious objects associated with Prussia’s most famous son: musical instruments, tapestries and Frederick the Great’s library. In the late afternoon of the 13th, the transport had reached Bernterode in Thuringia. The coffins were lodged in the mine and concealed behind blocks of salt. All those involved were sworn to secrecy.
American soldiers reached the mine on 27 April and found the coffins. When they left Thuringia in keeping with the decisions taken at Yalta and in preparation for the meeting at Potsdam, they carried the dead bodies off with them. They took them to the university city of Marburg where they were initially housed in the cellar of the Schloss, before being brought to the basement of the city archive.
On 21 August 1946 the royal bodies were secretly reburied in the St Elisabeth’s Church in the city. A few days later they were joined by the Hindenburgs. The pastor agreed to lodge the bodies under pressure from the Americans and Oskar von Hindenburg, the president’s son, who had commanded POW camps during the war and had been arraigned as a war criminal. He was let off with a fine.187 The royal bodies were finally walled up in the church on the 21st, in the presence of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia - the crown prince’s eldest surviving son - and his wife, Princess Kira.an Somewhere along the way an act of petty larceny had been carried out against the person of Frederick the Great: his Order of the Black Eagle had been pilfered, probably by an American soldier. You co
uld still see where it had been by the star-shaped patch of pure Prussian blue on his otherwise faded uniform tunic.ao
3
Berlin
When I rode through the area around the Tiergarten yesterday, I thought to myself: one day they will talk of May 1945 in the same way as they describe the Sack of Rome. Naturally, it was different to 1527, because Berlin was already half finished, but had it not been for the lunacy of the defence it would not have been so much of a battlefield. It was only when we now see what the Russians are taking away that we can see how fundamentally rich we were.
Margret Boveri, Tage des Überlebens, Frankfurt/Main 1996, 140-1
There was no shortage of bones in Berlin on 2 May 1945 when General Weidling signed the ceasefire in that city. The Russians had finished the business a day late: they had hoped to have defeated the Germans by - if not on - May Day;1 but still, the enemy was soundly thrashed. Of the 150,000 homes in the centre of the city, only 18,000 were undamaged, and 32,000 were completely destroyed. After Goebbels had incited Berliners to fight to the last, his deputy Fritzsche told them to stop: 134,000 soldiers laid down their arms.2 Ruth Friedrich, who had been a member of a low-key resistance group, thought the Third Reich had vanished like a ghost. She exulted in the deaths of Hitler and Goebbels: ‘Go to hell, Führer and Reich Chancellor! Tempi passati! You don’t interest us any more.’3
At least, Berliners might have imagined it was over, but they knew what to expect. The only thing Goebbels had not mooted were the occasional acts of kindness. Charlottenburg, where the journalist Margret Boveri lived, was an affluent area, and one of the last to surrender. She became aware of the change in the situation when she ventured out on to the streets to obtain her last quarter-pound of butter. She found Russians already sniffing at the queues. Most of the Berliners had thought it prudent to don white armbands. They openly complained of the Party for the first time. When she got home she found that German soldiers had broken into a neighbour’s cellar to steal civilian clothes. They intended to make a break for the west: no one wanted to be caught by the Russians.ap
The Russians picked over the city, exploring their new prize. The impotent and ruinous Reichstag building became the symbol of Russian victory. It had ceased to function as a democratic assembly soon after Hitler came to power. Marshal Zhukov added his signature to the others on the stonework of the interior.4aq The journalist Konstantin Simonov wandered around the Tiergarten. He looked in at the Zoo to see the dead and emaciated animals lying beside the bodies of SS men. He went to the huge Anti-Aircraft Tower that had fought to the last. Inside there had been drunken orgies as the last act had been played out. There were the bodies of suicides everywhere. In one cubicle he found a dead SS general, his uniform tunic unbuttoned and a bottle of champagne between his legs. He had committed suicide with his mistress, who lay beside him in a pretty white blouse and skirt. He went on to the Reich Chancellery where agents of Soviet Military Intelligence, or Smersh, had already identified the bodies of Goebbels and his wife and children. Hitler and Eva Braun eluded them for the time being.5 Schwerin von Krosigk spoke on the airwaves: ‘The world can only be pacified if the Bolshevik wave can be prevented from overwhelming it.’6
The Russians were drunk, and not just with victory. ‘Woina kaputt!’ (The war’s over!) and ‘Gitler durak!’ (Hitler’s a blockhead!). The terror began quietly in Margret Boveri’s Charlottenburg. ‘Ich Pistol!’ announced the soldiers. ‘Du Papier!’ That meant that they had guns, and no amount of paperwork was going to do you any good if you wanted to hang on to property or virtue. ‘There is nothing in this city that isn’t theirs for the taking,’ reported another woman who lived near Neukölln in the south.7 At first the Russian soldiers came for watches. With a cry of ‘Uhri! Uhri!’‡ they snatched, sometimes discarding the previous acquisition, which had simply stopped and needed to be rewound. This anonymous ‘Woman’ saw many Red Army soldiers with whole rows of watches on their arms ‘which they continuously kept winding, comparing and correcting - with childish, thievish pleasure’.8 For the Russians, Berlin - even in its ruinous state - was the picture of sophistication. They thought that the light was captured in lightbulbs and unscrewed them to send them home. They were fascinated by lavatories with flushes - and allegedly used them to wash their potatoes in. Little things, like cigarette lighters, were not only new, but utterly enchanting to them.9
Some Berliners came out well from the experience. One Charlottenburger was seized and stripped of his elegant leather jacket. The Russian assailant tossed him his windcheater in return. His initial despondency at the exchange soon turned to jubilation: in the pockets of the soldier’s garment he found two watches and two pieces of jewellery, including a valuable ring. Ruth Friedrich watched a Mongol soldier, who had befriended them, empty his pockets of wristwatches, lighters, golden rings and silver necklaces, ‘like a child, calling them “trophies”’.10 Margret Boveri remarked that the men of the Red Army:were like children in their glee over the new watches. One of them gazed alternately at his wristwatch and then pulled a pocket watch out and held it to his ear; we watchless ones, on the other hand, could only guess at the time. They sang and danced and played mouth organ and harmonica . . . and then they played ancient German records on a stolen German gramophone. The scene in the courtyard was reminiscent of the description of the Cossacks in Memories of an Old Manar . . .11
The Woman saw her liberators discard a collection of classical 78s, including Lohengrin and Beethoven’s Ninth, in favour of a record playing an advertising jingle from C&A in the Spittalmarkt.12
Nicolas Nabokov had a clear memory of Berlin at this time: ‘In front of the Adlon [hotel] stand two trucks. The first one contains a mountain of brass: tubas, trumpets and trombones covered by heavy Bokhara rugs. On top of the rugs sit three sullen-looking Mongoloid soldiers. Their uniforms are tattered. They are eating bread. The second truck stands half-cocked on three wheels, blocking the traffic. It contains thousands of naked typewriters, and standing in their midst a cow moos . . .’13
Gramophones were the Russians’ special delight. They played them non-stop until they were broken and then they had to purloin another. The Russian inability to master anything technical was ‘an inexhaustible chapter’.14 They stole all the bicycles they could find. The Woman saw them take them up to a street near the Hasenheide where they practised riding them. They sat ‘stiff on the saddles like chimpanzees in the zoo’.15 They frequently fell off before they mastered the use of the two-wheeled beast. Many bicycles were broken in the process and the wreckage strewn over the street. Ruth Friedrich’s friends collected up the bits and assembled new vehicles from them.16 The Russians were in the main ‘as good-natured as children. Some of them were sadists for all that.’17
Later they came looking for all stocks of food the Berliners had so carefully amassed. They liberated any alcohol they could lay their hands on. Drunk, they were even less easy to control. Then they amused themselves by setting fire to buildings. Anything they did not steal they destroyed: valuable antiques and musical instruments, elegant clothes and works of art. Flats were requisitioned for the use of officers, the occupants chased away with knives and pistols. But on that first day the Charlottenburger were more frightened of what the Americans would do; it was thought they were even more bent on revenge than the Russians.18
Then the rape and slaughter began in earnest. Conservative estimates place the number of Berlin women raped at 20,000.19 It began in Neukölln at 6 p.m. on 27 April. In the Woman’s cellar they went for the distiller’s wife first, as she appeared to promise two pleasures; after that it was the baker’s wife. The Woman thought the fattest were most in danger, because fat, for a Russian, represented good health. The rapists left the scrawnier, half-starved Berlin women until last.20 Anxious parents hid their still virginal daughters in lofts, in cupboards or under sofas. The Woman described the dislocated experience of rape. The feeling was more of paralysis than disgust. She felt an utter coldness, ‘
the spine seems to be frozen, icy dizziness encircles the back of the head . . . It’s like sinking through the floor.’ When her attacker left he tossed her a packet of cigarettes.21
Margret Boveri first came face to face with it when she visited some friends in plush Dahlem in the south-west of the city. They had been ‘liberated’ several days before. The worst cases involved very young children or elderly ladies, and the victims were often killed afterwards. Sometimes they took their own lives. In one instance soldiers raped the sisters who worked as nurses in the military hospital, infecting them with syphilis at the same time.22 It was rumoured that the severity of the rapine was caused by the fact the Russians had sent in units made up of criminals - such as the Nazis had used at the time of the Warsaw Uprising - but this was later revealed to have been untrue. Rapists were threatened with gruesome punishments, but the prospect of satisfying their lust proved stronger than the fear of chastisement.
That the Russians had received some sort of order was made clear to the Woman, who spoke a rudimentary Russian and could understand some of the exchanges between the conquerors. One officer reprimanded a soldier with the words ‘ukas Stalina’ (Stalin’s orders), but the man answered back, saying the Germans had raped his sister. While the Woman was raped later by two Russians, a female soldier interrupted her comrades. When she saw what they were doing she merely laughed. The Woman promptly complained to another officer, but he dismissed her. They had not done her any harm, and all his men were healthy, he said.23
Ruth Friedrich was spared, largely because her lover, the conductor Leo Borchard, spoke fluent Russian. She visited a friend who had been raped by seven soldiers, ‘one after the other, like beasts’. ‘We need to commit suicide . . . we certainly can’t live like this,’ the friend said.24 Ruth’s friend Frank addressed the Russian need for women: the euphoria of victory manifested itself in the flesh of Berlin’s womenfolk; the Russians took bodily possession of German soil, bit by bit; and bodily they consumed German flesh, night by night.25
After the Reich Page 14