After the Reich
Page 16
The bourgeois parties were permitted to field candidates only in certain constituencies. The CDU ran less than 20 per cent of those presented by the SED, and the LPD a little over 10 per cent. The results came as no surprise to any one: the SED won with an aggregate score of 57.1 per cent, having received more than half the votes in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg - once the bastion of reaction.61 Kurt Schumacher, who led the Socialist Party in the Western zones of Germany, was incensed by the Soviet emasculation of the SPD; nor were the socialists won over in Berlin’s Western sectors. In March 1946 the call to join the SED was rejected by 82.2 per cent of socialists. In the east they were not consulted. The German Social Democrats had rejected a system intended for all Germany, and made the first move towards creating a separate state outside the SBZ.62
With virtually all men of an appropriate age dead, missing or interned, the Allies created a gerontocracy, using politicians who had been tried and tested in the Weimar Republic and who had been impotent during Nazi times. The heads of the CDU in Berlin, for example, were Messrs Schiffer and Külz. Külz was an ambitious seventy-year-old, while Schiffer was more than ten years older and a contemporary of Friedrich Naumann. Andreas Hermes, who created the CDU in the Soviet Zone, was a sprightly sixty-seven, but he had been a minister as far back as 1920. After 20 July 1944 he had been arrested, but then released.
Wolfgang Leonhard had been given his instructions. He provides a good example in his appointment of a mayor to the middle-class borough of Wilmersdorf in Berlin. He met a man in the street who had been put in a concentration camp after 20 July. Leonhard wanted to appoint him mayor, but the man refused the job. The man in the street knew of another man, a Dr Willenbucher, who completely fitted the description Ulbricht gave to his lieutenants. Willenbucher was the usual wrecked figure who had crawled out of a hole after 2 May, but when he was summoned to meet Ulbricht and have his appointment ratified, he appeared in a black suit, and stood upright: ‘he was no longer bent, and there was a new dignity in his walk’. Ulbricht broke open the vodka to celebrate his appointment.63 In Berlin-Zehlendorf, the first post-Nazi mayor was a Werner Witgenstein; a man with vision who wanted to turn the borough into a centre for the arts and culture. Cultural policy was in the hands of a Herr Rühmann, an actor of a very average ability who naturally put the weight on cinema and theatre. A Herr Glum (a former general director of the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gesellschaft) sought to start a university - a difficult undertaking when books were being systematically impounded and taken to Russia.
The authorities in the SBZ were better when it came to marshalling the talents of prominent pre-war Berliners to help in specific sectors. Thus the former minister for the food supply, Dr Hermes, was responsible for food; the great surgeon Sauerbruch was given the health portfolio; and the architect Hans Scharoun was assigned building. In the first weeks of June a fresh delivery of Muscovites included the prudish Wilhelm Pieck, Fred Oelssner, Paul Wandel, the expressionist poet Johannes R. Becher, Edwin Hörnle and Marthe Arendsee. The former exiles lived a communal life at 80 Prinzenallee, which fairly buzzed with activity.64 Their final destination was 76-79 Wallstrasse. Their arrival was the cue to refound the KPD or Communist Party, except it was now to be ‘antifa’ or anti-fascist, and not Marxist. Of the sixteen founder members at the meeting on 12 June, thirteen were Muscovites.65
The Berliners were largely without news. Snippets of gossip were exchanged around the pretty Wilhelmine pumps that stood in all parts of the city as the people went to fetch water to wash and cook. The Soviets remained in sole custody of Berlin for a couple more months, however, claiming that the texts did not make it clear how the Western Allies were to have land access to their sectors of the city from the Western zones, even if the air routes had been mapped out - a detail that was to prove advantageous to the West during the airlift of 1948-9.66av
The Soviets divided their conquered world into Nazis and non-Nazis. Suddenly the number of people prepared to admit to having been among Hitler’s nine million began to drop. In Wannsee, for example, the first post-war headcount established just eighty members. By July that figure had risen to a thousand, largely as a result of denunciations.67 The Pgs were at a disadvantage in what was already a desperate situation: they received no rations, and had to spend their days in Schippen, the process of clearing away the debris and dismantling industry to be shipped back to Russia. The politically suspect had to assemble at the labour exchanges at 7 a.m. Details were sent off to clear rubble, bury corpses, clean streets, clear drains and prepare bricks for rebuilding.68 There was a rumour that the so-called Alte Kämpfer - the people who joined the Party even before Hitler achieved power - were treated the worst, and had to carry out the most back-breaking work in exchange for bread and water.
They worked hard. Margret Boveri reported that ten days after the fall of Berlin the piles of rubble left by four years of bombing had been cleared from the streets. Once again the women bore the brunt. ‘Rubble-women’ formed chains with buckets which they filled with broken bricks and mortar. The few men that were involved in the clearances only worked when the Russian supervisor looked on. The Russians were quick to create an infrastructure in Berlin. Financial and cultural institutions were set up. Sporting fixtures were arranged.69 The time became Moscow time, and it was light at midnight as a result. By 13 May a bus route was working again and on the 14th the first U-Bahn set out since the fall. The airfields were patched up and put back to work.70 The Soviet authorities treated with consideration petitioners who came to them wanting to set up essential businesses. Bakers were encouraged to go back to work, and flour was promised to help them make bread. On 16 May the anonymous Woman diarist was attached to a Russian officer who had been sent to get the banking system working again. He suddenly began to speak to her in French, and she realised he was a Biwsche - a survival from the pre-1917 ancien régime.71
The Soviet authorities were severe when it came to Pgs. Before the Western Allies arrived, they closed 1,400 shops owned by Party members and sacked nearly 12,000 functionaries. Nacht und Nebel kidnappings also removed nearly 5,500 Berliners, many of them members of the press and the police. A number of former resisters headed east into captivity as well, such as Alexander Werth, who had been incarcerated by the Nazis and worked with Adam von Trott in the Information Department of the German Foreign Office; and Horst von Einsiedel, a member of the Kreisau Circle around Helmuth James von Moltke who was to die in a Soviet prison camp in 1947. Another was an unnamed Baltic baron who had been in Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr or military intelligence and who was kidnapped in the British Sector. Sometimes the Soviets arrested their own men, as was the case with Makar Ivanov, a culture-boffin who had contacts with the British through Leo Borchard.72 The police in the SBZ were run by Paul Markgraf, a former Wehrmacht colonel who had been captured at Stalingrad and who converted to communism during his imprisonment by the Russians.73 There were exaggerated rumours: the actor Heinrich George had been shot and his colleague Gustaf Gründgens arrested. George had been the Intendant of the Schiller Theatre and, as such, a fellow traveller. He didn’t die for another eighteen months, when he succumbed to the treatment he received at the liberated Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The killing had continued under new masters.
Gründgens had been taken in, but he fared better than George. He had run the State Theatre during the Third Reich, but used his position to protect a number of people who had fallen foul of the regime. The Russians released him soon after. The danger was denunciation. The Russians encouraged people to denounce others in order to save their own skins. The Soviets were especially anxious to discover the whereabouts of the top officials of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Pleading innocence did not help. If you could not provide an answer you were led away and never heard of again. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry (‘ProMi’) had been responsible for seemingly harmless organisations such as the Foreign Press Club, but as far as the Russians were concerned anyone tarred with its brush was liable to arbitrary a
rrest. Working for the Press Club had had advantages, as had the Press Department of the Foreign Office, which was Ribbentrop’s rival organisation to the official Information Department - journalists received bigger rations. It did not necessarily follow that the people who performed the relatively menial roles within these organisations were members of the Party, though many were.
A small number of Jews had gone through the war unscathed - they were the so-called U-Booten or submarines. One man, whom Margret Boveri encountered on her bicycle, turned out to be a rabbi, who had lived in comparative peace under an assumed name. Another case she unearthed was a certain Frau Nerwig, a pure Jewess whose Aryan husband had died in 1939, but who had married an English Mr Lind pro forma and had therefore survived the war. As a Mischling, her son Klaus was exempted from army service and obliged to go to the Todt construction organisation, where he would have surely died had he not fled at the right moment. The boy was powerful and blond, and the Russians refused to believe that he was not an SS man in disguise. The mother responded by pulling the commanding officer on to the sofa with her. Klaus thereby survived.
A Viennese Jew in British army uniform, George Clare found another Jewess who had survived the war because her Aryan husband had refused to divorce her. He had been the headmaster of a Berlin Gymnasium or grammar school. The Nazis forced him out of his job and he had to work as a commercial traveller. Then the Russians came and he refused to hand over his bicycle, so they shot him.74 Later the Russians were keen to use what Jews they could find to fill important roles in the city. The machinist Walter Besser was put in charge of a hospital. The last Berlin Jews were all lodged in the Jewish Hospital in the Iranische Strasse. They included twenty or so informers who had been protected by the Gestapo, as well as a further 800 ‘privileged Jews’ married to Gentiles. As early as 6 May a religious service was performed in the hospital by the Rabbi Kahane and five days later the Sabbath was celebrated at the Jewish Cemetery in Weissensee.75 On 21 June there was a Jewish cultural evening at the Levetzower Strasse synagogue. That month the Soviet authorities appointed the dentist Moritz Blum as the first head of the Jewish Governing Board based in the ruins of the old synagogue on the Oranienburger Strasse.
Subsistence
Food was an obsession for all Berliners. Ruth Friedrich and her friends had been thrown out of the billet where they had spent the last weeks of the war. They moved into a deserted house hoping to find food. Onions was all there was. Later they located a cache of sherbet powder, sweet chews and stock cubes. Their Mongol friend was not impressed when he came to call. With Russian help, however, they killed a cow. As they hacked the beast into manageable pieces they were astonished to see people creep out of holes in the ground with buckets in their hands and beg for a slice of bloody meat. ‘Give me the liver . . . Give me the tongue!’ they cried.76
The Russians provided some food from the beginning. There were fixed and mobile canteens serving hot soup. In three months they delivered 188,000 tons of food to Berlin. Baking began again on 9 May. It was black and wet, but it was bread of sorts. Ration cards were introduced on the 17th. The cards were graded I-V. Later a card VI was printed. The largest rations went to the workers who were eligible for card I: 600 grams of bread, 30 of fat and 100 of meat; Nazis and housewives received the ‘Hunger Card’ - number V: that meant 300 grams of bread, 7 of fat and 20 of meat. Ruth Friedrich knew a woman who had card V. Her husband had been a Pg, and she had five children. As they received the food, she lay in bed, because she was too hungry to stand. She weighed just forty kilos.77
Margret Boveri lists the contents of her larder and the occasional feasts she ate during those meagre days. A surprise visit from Elvira von Zitzewitz was used as a pretext to bring out some of the best things she had: soup made from a stock prepared from the lung of a horse slaughtered in the street below, in the last moments of the war; then potatoes boiled in their skins; the remains of some pasta e piselli; and, to finish, a dessert made from ‘pudding powder’ and some cherry compôte that had begun to ferment: ‘a meal for the gods!’78 Many Berliners grew potatoes among the ruins. Others had window boxes filled with chervil and borage.79 The Charlottenburger seem to have had the pick of the horses. When Ruth Friedrich walked down the Chaussee (now Strasse des 17 Juni) on 17 May the street stank of rotting horse carcasses. The bones were picked quite clean.80
It could only get worse. Shortage of milk drove mothers in Neukölln to the local Russian command, or Kommandatura. They said their children would die without milk. The Soviets replied that it made no difference if they died now or in a year’s time. At the end of June the Russians rounded up the ninety cows in the model farm in Dahlem. Their milk had been largely reserved for them anyhow, but it was bad for morale to see them leave for Russia. The animals were suffering from foot and mouth disease, and it was questionable whether they would make it alive.81 That being said, the Russians stressed from the beginning that they intended to feed the Berliners; they created a political structure and encouraged cultural activity. They did not treat the Germans as the Germans had vowed to deal with them. The Germans were not to be exterminated.
Those who acquiesced when it came to marauding Russian soldiers could do considerably better. After a visit by the usual posse of Russians, the Woman counted her blessings. She had bread, herrings (they had been cut up on the mahogany table), tinned meat and the remains of a flitch of bacon, all brought by her visitors. When the Russians left, they took only the alcohol away with them: ‘I have not eaten so well in years,’ she concluded. Later a Russian arrived with a couple of small turbot. Even more astonishing was a later visit when one of her admirers brought her a bottle of tokay.82
By mid-June the prices of food on the ‘free’ market were astronomical: strawberries (then in season) were 7.50 Reichsmarks a pound; a kohlrabi, 50 Pfennigs, but you had to queue for four hours to get one and the chances were that the shop would be sold out. On the black market a pound of meat fetched 100 Reichsmarks, and by July the price of a kilo tin of dripping had risen to RM500. Watches and jewellery could be exchanged for food from the Russians in the Keithstrasse.83 The wartime staple had been potatoes. Margret Boveri’s last delivery had been in October 1944, which she eked out until mid-July, by which time they were quite blue inside. Every now and again she and her friends alighted on a windfall crop in a park or garden. On 18 July she made a list of what she had been able to obtain so far that month: two kohlrabis, a small lettuce, 250 grams of blackcurrants, 600 grams of sugar, ‘and for 500 gm worth of coupons, 300 gm of meat. There are no potatoes and no fat. There is neither salt nor vinegar. Now, however, I can queue up for bread.’ By the end of the month there had been much promised, but little received: no fat, meat, fruit, vegetables, vinegar, ersatz coffee or salt all month; just a part of the potatoes, bread, 620 grams of sugar, 600 grams of flour and seven stock cubes.84
Berliners felt totally cut off from the outside world. There was no transport (all bicycles and cars were liable to requisition) and there was no telephone. Meanwhile the Russians were pulling up one set of railway lines on every track and taking these away with them. Anyone who had illegally retained their wireless set had to reckon with highly irregular power. The effect in the long term was to alter the nature of Berlin, from being the industrial powerhouse that it had been since the nineteenth century to being a city devoid of industry in the late twentieth.
Two things were important for the dignity of the new helots, particularly the women: hairstyling and flowers. Margret Boveri took pride in the flower arrangements she created in her bombed-out house. During the Berlin Blitz, there had been hairdressers on hand in the flak towers ready to groom the women until the all-clear sounded. Fuel was another problem. With time the Berlin parks - the Tiergarten and the massive Grunewald - would be shorn of their flora. Even in the summer of 1945 the Grunewald was being cleared of fallen branches, while others looked for blackened beams in the burned-out buildings.85 Electricity was restored on 25 July, however
, and on 5 August a limited postal service began to function. Berlin was no longer isolated from the rest of Germany. But the agony was not over. After the blights of murder, rape and starvation came disease: by mid-June a hundred Berliners a day were dying of typhus and paratyphus carried by human lice, and Berliners were forbidden from entering premises commandeered by the Western Allies.86
The Arrival of the Western Allies
Everyone waited for the Western Allies in the hope that their arrival would improve matters. Stalin, however, was playing for time so that he might remove anything valuable from the city, and sink trusty communists deep into any positions of power. Had he been able to renege on the deal to allow the Anglo-Americans in, he would have done so. Soviet permission to proceed to Berlin hung on the Western Allies retreating to the demarcation lines drawn up at Yalta. The Anglo-Americans were to fall back behind the Elbe.87
On 2 June Lieutenant-General Lucius Clay, who was to head the American mission in Berlin, had yet to receive instructions. The Americans’ first attempt to reach Berlin failed utterly. On 17 June Colonel Frank Howley left with a reconnaissance party of 500 men in a hundred vehicles. He was well prepared. Behind him he had left a pool of 2,000 college-educated Berlin women who were to be his secretariat in the city and he had acquired a Horch Roadmaster - Germany’s best car - and draped it with the Stars and Stripes. As he crossed the Elbe at Dessau in his Horsch the Soviet authorities insisted he reduce his train and continue with just thirty-seven officers in fifty vehicles. The convoy, Howley later wrote, reached ‘Babelsburg [sic] . . . a sort of German Hollywood’ near Potsdam under Soviet escort where it was forced to stop and eventually return to the west. Howley was allowed to go up and look at the future American airfield at Tempelhof. No one else had been permitted to leave their cars.88