The preferred form of suicide was poison, and there was much discussion of the best and most painless way to quit life. The discussions had started before the Russians arrived. It had been a favourite topic of conversation between Hitler and his secretaries at their nocturnal teas.26 Berlin women, it seems, were short of food, but well provided with poison. There were instances of mass-suicide by poison. The actor Paul Bildt and some twenty others despatched themselves thus, only he woke again and lived for another dozen years. His daughter was among the dead. Attesting once more to the incidence of suicide among the nobles, especially those who lived on isolated estates in the Mark Brandenburg, the writer cites a number of cases showing how far the old families would go to protect the dignity of their daughters: death was preferable to dishonour.
Elsewhere the rapes soon became routine and when it was not accompanied by violence it could eventually be laughed off. A kind of gallows humour grew up that was encapsulated in the expression ‘Besser ein Iwan auf dem Bauch als ein Ami auf dem Kopf!’ (Better a Russki on the belly than a Yank on the head!), meaning that rape was preferable to being blown up by a bomb. The Woman’s friend, a widow, was over fifty when she was raped by an unbearded boy. He later paid her a compliment, saying she was considerably tighter than the women of the Ukraine. She was proud of the remark and repeated it to other women.27 One journalist of Margret Boveri’s acquaintance, for example, was able to make light of her rape, even if she had cried at the time - ‘in retrospect the story sounded very funny: the hanging water bottle and all the other bits of equipment getting in the way, the inexperience of the young man and the speed at which it was consummated’. 28 Margret commented: ‘Middle-class people have never spoken so frankly about sex before. Are they really sympathising with the victims, or is it more erotic titillation? There is a good deal of longing for love in our city, deprived of men, and there are many unconscious ways to compensate.’29 Her friend Elsbeth, herself a victim of a savage rapist who had not only cracked her skull but knocked out most of her teeth, lost her middle-class prudishness with the experience. Such matters were discussed openly for the first time: ‘naturally there is lots to laugh about’.30
In a frightful twist in the gallows humour of the time, Berlin children used to play the ‘Frau komm mit!’ game, with the boys taking the part of the soldiers and the girls their victims. In normal times the children had mimicked ‘Zurücktreten, Zug fährt ab!’ (Stand back! The train is leaving!), a line they heard every time they took the U- or S-Bahn, Berlin’s metro system. During the war it had been ‘Achtung! Achtung! Schwacher Kampfverband über Perleberg in Richtung auf die Reichshauptstadt’ (Warning! Warning! A light enemy squadron is over Perleberg, flying in the direction of the Imperial Capital).31as
Very few escaped the rapine, although the Swiss Max Schnetzer reported areas that were spared ‘like a hailstorm that only destroys part of the harvest’.32 One acquaintance of Margret Boveri’s who refused was shot. Another, who was left miraculously alone, explained this by telling the writer that the Russians didn’t like women who wore spectacles. The presence of very small children cooled off the lusty Russians on occasion. As we have seen, Russian sentiment about children was well known. Also pregnant women were avoided. The Russians were ‘horribly normal’ and the Woman could think of no instance of ‘Man come!’ There was a lesbian living in her block who dressed as a man, and who was never molested.33
Men didn’t help much. In some instances they told the women to go quietly so as not to put their own lives in jeopardy. Some gallantly but bootlessly tried to come between the rapists and their women, like an Aryan man who had protected his Jewish wife throughout the war, and who bled to death while his wife was raped.34 There was a trade in stars of David, which sold for up to RM500, but in the end the Russians couldn’t care less if the woman was Jewish or the house they plundered had a Jewish owner. They had not gone to war to protect the Jews after all.35
Sometimes the presence of a husband was a deterrent, but it was a risky business, particularly if the soldier was drunk.36 The Russian-speaking Leo Borchard was able to save one girl by saying she was his daughter. He sat up drinking schnapps with the Russians and, by doing so, was able to protect the female members of his gang, while down in the cellars the ‘victims squealed like stuck piglets’.37 Men receive a bad press in contemporary accounts, but it must have been an emasculating experience for a man to see or hear his loved one violently raped and be unable to stop it. One man, who had witnessed his wife laughing and drinking and sleeping with the Russians, killed her before shooting himself. Others tortured themselves with reproaches about their passivity at the crucial time. The women complained that their men spurned them after the experience, but conversely many women became frigid after being raped and rejected their husbands and lovers. The fact that the victims discussed their experiences with other women within their husbands’ earshot cannot have made it easier.38
Canny Berlin women learned quickly that it was wisest to give in and receive the Russians one at a time than to have to put up with terrifying gang rapes. The wisest found an officer and stuck with him: a ‘wolf’ to protect you from wolves, and as high-ranking as possible. In return for sexual favours he was able to prevent any attacks by the routine soldateska. This was true for an eighteen-year-old in Klein Machnow who had been raped sixty times. She found a captain and they left her in peace.39 The Woman in Berlin did likewise. After a few tussles with soldiers she found a sympathetic lieutenant, and finally a major, who wanted more companionship than sex. She described the blissful sensation of lying fearless at his side. When she was later asked the standard question about how many times it had happened to her she could not say with certainty: ‘No idea. I had to work my way up through the ranks as far as a major.’40
Even those who laughed about the rapes in retrospect found their nerves ground down by the nightly attacks. Most of the rapists in Charlottenburg, Margret Boveri discovered, were simple soldiers sleeping rough in the park. Those who had been properly billeted behaved better. She resorted to sleeping pills to get though the night, and didn’t wake when the Russians knocked at her door. Only in the morning did she hear the grim news from the neighbours.
The rapes continued throughout the time the Russians had Berlin to themselves, but they slackened off markedly after 4 May. Their initial lust sated, some Russians, at least, looked for greater refinements. Margret Boveri’s pretty journalist friend Frau Zetterberg was confined to a hospital for some time after a two-hour session with a drunken chauffeur. Another acquaintance suffered a particularly disgusting attack. Margret spares us the details, but reminds us of the line of the Empress Theodora, who had regretted that God had given her just four ways to satisfy her lust.41at
Even when Berlin women were not driven so far as to take their own lives, the rapes had inevitable consequences in the form of disease and babies. On 18 August Ruth Friedrich noted that there would be an epidemic of babies in six months’ time ‘who don’t know who their fathers are, are the products of violence; conceived in fear; and delivered in horror. Should they be allowed to live?’ Some of these unwanted babies were placed in a home in Wilmersdorf. In 1946 it was estimated that one in six of the children born out of wedlock had been fathered by Russians.42 Coping with syphilis and gonorrhoea without antibiotics was part of a woman’s life at the time. Ten per cent of those raped were infected, and antibiotics cost the equivalent of two pounds of coffee.43 Eventually the Russians decided to treat the local population themselves. Most of the unwanted Russian children were aborted, although there was the usual rumour that Stalin had forbidden the women to dispose of their children because he wanted to see an alteration in the racial mix. Abortion was a crude business, normally carried out without anaesthetic and costing about RM1,000. Many women performed the act on themselves, with inevitable consequences. Despite the massive incidence of abortion, it is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ survived to see the light of day.44
Despite the terror and the rape, sometimes there were sympathetic moments between the conquerors and the largely unprotected Berlin women in those first days. Margret Boveri recounts the story of an impromptu dinner party when Russian soldiers, whom she and her friends had fed on turnips, returned the favour and arrived bearing wine, still and sparkling, bread and other edibles and gave the women news of the probable division of the country into zones of occupation. Such largesse was a common experience. As the Woman put it, ‘they love to play Father Christmas’.45
The daily threat of rape petered out only when the Western Allies arrived in July, and when the Soviet authorities realised that it was damaging their chances of political success among the civilian population. When the first free elections were held it became clear that the Red Army had not won over ‘hearts and minds’ and that Berliners, like the Viennese, wanted anything but a Moscow-inspired communist regime.46
By the time Ursula von Kardorff returned in September, she called Berlin a ‘city without Eros’. ‘Women over thirty look old, frustrated and sad. Make-up covers up so little. “Frau komm”, the cry that rang through the city as the victor called for his rights to rape, plunder and shoot, rings still in every ear.’ She heard her fair share of rape stories: of a girl of her class who was raped by five Russians and abandoned by her noble fiancé; and of a friend in Zehlendorf who hid behind a coal dump from the Russians but was given away by another women who sought to protect her own daughter. She was raped by twenty-three soldiers and had to be sewn up afterwards. She could not imagine having sex with a man ever again. Ursula heard another story, of a girl who had found a lover in an English soldier. One day she had pointed to a German soldier in rags, called him a ‘prolonger of war’ and slapped him. The English soldier gave the man cigarettes and abandoned the girl on the spot.47
The Soviets in the Saddle
Officially peace came to Berlin on 8 May. Despite the terror of the past two weeks, Ruth Friedrich was still positive: ‘free from bombs, free from blackouts, free from the Gestapo and free from Nazis! . . . pax nobiscum!’48 It had taken a while to bring in the other Allies to sign the surrender document: the Briton Tedder, the American Spaatz and the Frenchman de Lattre de Tassigny.au They came with a band of accredited journalists. Zhukov represented the Red Army. The German side was represented by Field Marshal Keitel, Admiral von Friedeburg and air force General Stumpff. It was Keitel’s last public engagement before Nuremberg.
The location was the Soviet HQ in an old military engineering school in Karlshorst in the east of the city. At 10 p.m. - midnight Russian time - the German delegation was ushered in. Looking like ‘Boris Karloff’, Keitel handed over a document signed by Dönitz confirming the unconditional surrender arranged in Rheims the day before. Keitel allegedly trembled as he signed the Allied paper, and his monocle fell out. The Germans were bundled out again before a dinner was thrown for the Allied plenipotentiaries. It was now 1 a.m. Russian time. The party and dancing went on until the morning. The generals danced, Zhukov performing a Russkaya. There were four full hours of toasts and many of the soldiers were literally under the table.49 When the festivities came to an end there was a massive cannonade, which some Berliners misinterpreted, imagining the war had started up all over again.50 The Soviets had known where to find the wine: 65,000 bottles of claret had been located to this end, and others beside. They had taken it from a walled-up section of the cellars of Berlin’s best hotel, the Adlon. The fate of the hotel was sealed by the discovery of the wine cellar. Russian lorries came to take away the contents, and very soon a fire broke out that was to destroy one of the few buildings in the street that had survived the conflict.51
The ‘Muscovites’ came home in three waves: first the Ulbricht Group, who arrived behind the 1st Belorussian Front on 27 April; secondly the Ackermann Group, which followed on the heels of the 2nd Belorussian Front on 1 May; and thirdly Gustav Sobottka’s men, who landed in Mecklenburg on 6 May. The Ulbricht Group was the cream of the Muscovites. They had been housed in Moscow’s Hotel Lux. Ten of them were flown back to Germany as the Russians moved in for the kill. They landed at Bruchmühle, thirty kilometres east of Berlin. On the beautiful spring morning of May 1, as the Red Army concluded its operations in the capital, a German woman told them of the widespread rape that had accompanied the Soviet advance. The Muscovites dismissed her claims as fantasy.52 Later Walter Ulbricht conceded that such things might have happened, but he was not prepared to discuss the matter: ‘Any concession to these emotions is, for us, quite simply out of the question.’53 Whether that meant these matters were trivial in the long term or that he did not have enough power to take it up with the Soviet authorities is not made clear.
Ulbricht emphasised to his colleagues what the task ahead would be. They were to create cells - ‘our task will be the building of German agencies for self-government in Berlin’. The group made its way into Berlin. It was ‘a picture of hell’. They noticed the women around the pumps with their white and red armbands, confirmed both their peaceful natures and their friendliness to the Soviet Union. No one was ever in any doubt that the red had been taken from redundant swastika flags.54 The Muscovites had been given the task of finding a means of supplying food to the survivors: there was a propaganda role as there were hearts and minds to be won. The rations for Germans were to be similar to those in the USSR: 300-600 grams of bread daily.55 Not only did they want to know where food and water were to be procured, but Ulbricht was anxious for news of the comrades who had gone into hiding in the city.56
Before 1933 the communists had jockeyed for supremacy in Germany. In the last free elections of Weimar Germany in November 1932, they had won 100 seats to the Nazis’ 196. Some had subsequently gone over to the NSDAP, becoming ‘beefsteak Nazis’ - brown on the outside, red in the middle. Some had merely observed the forms. Others had gone underground and many went into concentration camps. For Ulbricht these men would provide the material he needed to set up his administration. Some of the communists were distinctly primitive rebels. They wanted to change the day of rest to Friday and replace the greeting ‘Guten Tag!’ with ‘Rote Front’. The Muscovites were generally more urbane. Some had been in the Russian capital for years and had taken out Soviet citizenship. Some, like the later spymaster Markus Wolf, had been brought up in Moscow. Hans Klering, the actor appointed to run the DEFA film studios, had been in Russia for fourteen years and had a Soviet wife. The Russian colonel Alexander Dymshitz said ‘He is really a Soviet actor.’57
Muscovites were strategically placed in every administration. At the head they installed a ‘harmless idiot’ who could be guaranteed to rubber-stamp the decisions taken by the Russian commandant. So the man installed as mayor of Berlin was the sixty-eight-year-old architect Dr Arthur Werner, ‘who, coughing and slurping, is hardly capable of delivering his Goethe-quotation-filled speech during the five-minute council-meeting’. Because the Russians had controlled the city since May, the Allies were not party to the appointments and had to put up with a Soviet fait accompli. Communists occupied 100 council seats of the 230 in Berlin.58 It was the same pattern as Vienna, only a little more so.
The Muscovites’ policy was revealed after the defection of the youngest of their number, Wolfgang Leonhard. In his book Child of the Revolution he gave the flavour of Ulbricht’s style of government. Ulbricht determined matters. As Berlin could not be openly communist, it was decided against placing communists in charge. They could get away with it, perhaps, in Wedding or Friedrichshain, because both areas had always been ‘red’. ‘In working-class areas mayors as a rule should be social democrats and in middle-class precincts - Zehlendorf, Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg, etc - we need men of bourgeois background, former members of the Zentrum [Catholic party], the Democratic or the German People’s Party. Best, those who have a doctorate and anti-fascist past and are prepared to co-operate with us . . .’ Attention was also paid to the mayors’ comrades: ‘The first deputy mayor, the head of personnel
and administration and the man who’s in charge of education must be our chaps. And you’ve also got to find one comrade who’s totally trustworthy. He’s the one who takes over the police . . . it’s got to look democratic, but all that really matters must be in our hands.’59
Ulbricht had been behind the selection of Dr Werner. When he had first aired the name his fellow Muscovites, Maron, Gyptner and Winzer, had been less than enthusiastic. Werner was too old, and it was suspected that he was ‘not quite right in the head’. ‘What’s the matter?’ retorted Ulbricht. ‘The deputy will be our man.’ So it was that the pliant Werner became the first post-war Oberbürgermeister of Berlin, and Karl Maron became his deputy, albeit with extreme reluctance on Maron’s part. He wanted to be top dog.60
As the Russians consolidated their power in Berlin prior to the arrival of the Western Allies, Zhukov on 12 June authorised the formation of bourgeois anti-fascist parties like the conservative CDU and the liberal LPD. Politically the British and the Americans lagged hopelessly behind. The British first flexed their muscles when on 17 August they acted to curtail the political power of the block and street wardens - communists who had inherited the job from the Nazis. Four days later the Americans scrapped the posts altogether, which had really only been about spying and denunciation.
The Muscovites set out to eliminate the hated socialists who had dominated Berlin for most of the Weimar Republic. Fusion was the answer: the SED or Socialist Unity Party was formed with the compliance of the leader of the SPD - socialist party - in the SBZ, Otto Grotewohl. Grotewohl was increasingly compromised: he had run off with a new woman. She had been in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BdM - the female version of the Hitler Youth) and a Pg, and the Russians knew it. Local elections were held in the first half of September 1945. Heavily monitored by the Soviet authorities, they must have resembled Hitler’s last cynical stab at democracy in the spring of 1933.
After the Reich Page 15