On the other hand demontage took its toll. Before the Western Allies established camp in Berlin, more than a hundred companies were shipped east. Berlin lost around 85 per cent of its industrial capacity, including such weighty names as Siemens, AEG, Osram and Borsig. As demontage the Russians took away a very large chunk of the industrial base of what had been one of the most highly developed parts of Germany. By the autumn of 1945 they had already dismantled 4,339 of the 17,024 major installations in their zone.28
Fritz Löwenthal was another Muscovite who returned to the SBZ in 1946. As a communist lawyer he was placed at the head of a legal commission. He fled to the West on 25 May 1947, taking with him a fat dossier detailing crime and corruption in the Soviet Zone. His account amounts to an indictment of the Soviet authorities, and a justification for the young idealist’s flight. Nazis were creeping back into positions of authority and all sorts of unsuitable characters achieving local power-bases as a result of toadying to the Soviet rulers.
The local judge at Lieberose, for example, turned out to be a former cook called (of all things) Bütter. On 3 January 1946 he was delivered up to the police in Potsdam accused of fraud. A week later he was found hanging in his cell, but the apparent suicide was contradicted by the state of his corpse - he had had his head beaten in, to stop him giving anything away at his trial.29 At Forst on the Neisse, there was a flourishing trade in contraband across the new border with Poland. Germans, Poles and Russians were all involved, and the need to prevent the military poking their noses into the smuggling trade resulted in at least one murder. Elsewhere in Germany corrupt Soviet officials sold grain to the Germans. Another German who was able to hoodwink the Soviets into believing she was anti-fascist was Sonja Kloss, the mayoress of Kolberg bei Storkau. She turned out to be a former SS interpreter who was protecting her lover, an erstwhile senior SS man.30
Anyone was in danger of being denounced, as most people had a skeleton in their closet. Muscovites and others who had co-operated with the Soviet authorities in Russia were generally above suspicion. In the sleepy town of Ruppin in the Mark Brandenburg, Landrat Dietrich had denounced the teacher Schulze in Gransee, whom he accused of having been an important leader in the Hitler Youth, and of seducing young boys. Dietrich owed his position of power to the fact that he had been on the committee of the Free Germany movement as a POW in Russia.31 In Oranienburg the local dictator was the senior judge, one Fandrich, who uncovered a former Wehrmacht paymaster hiding in his parish and had him consigned to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen which ‘the Russians had brought back to life’. It is not known if he ever re-emerged. Fandrich, who employed his son as a spy, was not all that he seemed: he was not a jurist, and he was not even German. He spoke fluent Russian and had fought in the Russian Imperial Army in the First World War. He had later lived as a merchant in Warsaw. Like many people who achieved power in Germany just after the war, Fandrich was a KZler. He had been in Sachsenhausen himself, where he had worn the green badge of a criminal. His position in the Soviet Zone allowed him to amass hordes of treasure handed over by those who did not want their past examined in detail. On those who were less considerate, he imposed prison sentences. By January 1947 he had become over-confident of his position with the Russians. An order was issued for his arrest, and, although he was given time to flee, he felt he was not in danger. He was later put on trial and received a five-year sentence.32
Many criminals posed as ‘victims of fascism’ in this way, like Werner Stahlberg, who had been released from the prison in Brandenburg, but who had been a common criminal. A band led by a Russian-speaking German Balt named Schröder carried out seventy-eight robberies in a ‘blue limousine’. They even robbed hospital patients of their valuables. Schröder had begun his life of crime when his friend and protector ‘Dr’ Werner Zahn, Oberbürgermeister of Potsdam, was arrested. Zahn was another conman who had invented his doctorate. Before the war he had sold cinema tickets.33
Löwenthal lifted the lid on Thuringia. Goethe’s Ilmenaubq was in the hands of Paul Flieder, a former communist who had nonetheless achieved high rank in the SS. With him installed in the town hall, fifty-one former Nazis found gainful employment. In Weissensee near Erfurt power was in the hands of one Hitkamp, another purported ‘victim of fascism’ who ran a robber-band, conducting house-to-house searches and confiscating property. In Eisenach the CID (criminal police) officer Kirchner turned out to have nine convictions of his own, while Reinhold Lettau, the police president who hired him, was an old Nazi. There could be tough sentences and quite arbitrary killings for anyone who fell foul of the Soviets. The Military Tribunal in Thuringia arraigned one man for being an intimate of the former Gauleiter, Sauckel, on the strength of a round-robin found in his home. In truth he was only the local Party cashier. He was tried by Russian officers in the cinema and sentenced to be hanged. His sentence was commuted by Stalin: he was shot instead.34
In Saxony, Karl Keller, the Bürgermeister of Zschieschen, was another ‘green’ who had spent eight years in a concentration camp and could boast thirty-two offences of theft and fraud. He was one of the lucky ones who got out: the prison population - many of them rounded up after the end of the war - was dying. When informed of the fact the Soviet commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Jakupov, dismissed the matter as ‘humanitarian whingeing’. Another Russian officer complained of naked Germans coming across the border from Czechoslovakia. They had been stripped, then pushed over the frontier. The officer said the best he could do was put them in a cellar. He had no clothes to give them. Some Russian officers were living a good life. A Major Astafiev was reported enjoying a regime unknown to tsarist courtiers or boyars: he had a woman to roll on each stocking in the morning and another to hand him his dressing gown.35 When in March 1947 the Soviet authorities pushed through land reform in Saxony, 300,000 hectares were nationalised, but only 50,000 were handed back to the peasants. The rest remained in the hands of the state. Meanwhile life was cheap in Saxony. When on 16 February 1946 the Russians decided that informer Helene Mader was no longer useful to them, the killer Zimmermann was paid the princely sum of 500 cigarettes.36
In the new state of Sachsen-Anhalt, in Niegripp near Burg on the Elbe, Josef Conrad passed as a political prisoner during his time in a concentration camp. The Russians were happy with his credentials and made him both Bürgermeister and police chief. They also gave him a gun and told him to round up the former Pgs and liquidate them. Conrad engaged a waiter with a record for theft named Walter Kraft and together they killed the teacher Seewald, the treasurer Dehne, the landlord Fabian and the agricultural worker Helmrich by putting a bullet in the backs of their heads. Their bodies were robbed.37
Rural Mecklenburg had formerly passed for the most reactionary corner of Germany. After 1945 it was the ‘most bolshevised’, according to Fritz Löwenthal. The head of the military government, General I. I. Fediunsky, lambasted the Germans for their lack of efficiency. The Germans were ‘shirkers’. One local Soviet commander, Colonel Serebriensky, he dubbed ‘the prompter at the Schwerin pocket edition of the Moscow world theatre’. Everything passed under his nose. It was presumably the colonel who caused the disappearance of Willi Jesse, the provincial secretary of the SED for Mecklenburg. Under his rule middle-class Mecklenburgers were held back. At school they were not allowed to progress beyond the ninth class or attend university. Some locals prospered under his reign, like the notorious Wilhelm Stange, Landrat in Usedom, who exploited his office to line his pockets.38
Not all so-called communists were crooks, but there was no shortage of people who came out of the woodwork in 1945 to claim that they had been persecuted by Hitler’s regime, and who demanded privilege as a result. The Muscovite Ackermann wryly observed that ‘It turned out that in the Soviet Union there were fewer Bolsheviks than there were in Hitlerite Germany.’ These former communists were jealous of the Wehrmacht officers who were given positions of authority under the Russians, especially those who had fought in Spain, or who ha
d been in a concentration camp, or both.39
Although the raping of German women had abated in the summer of 1945, it had not stopped. There was a fresh outburst of wild raping when the occupation lines were redrawn in June. The Russians moved into parts of Saxony and Thuringia where up till then the women had lived in comparative safety. There were a hundred rapes in Zerbst, the town that had seen the birth of Russia’s great queen, Catherine, and similar numbers were reported in Halle and Weimar. In Weimar a Russian lieutenant walked into a barber’s shop and proceeded to rape the cashier in front of the customers. Two other Russian officers had to be found before ‘this animal could be overpowered’.40 Despite the availability of abortions, many half-Russian children were born. In the US Ralph Keeling of the Institute of American Economics in Chicago thundered against the Russo-German bastards and envisaged ‘Bolshevised Mongolian-Slavic hordes’.41 Apart from the soldiers, there were around two million former POWs and forced labourers from Russia who had formed into gangs and robbed and raped all over central Europe.42
Real security was achieved only when the Red Army was garrisoned in barracks buildings in 1947-8. Even later the Russians took over whole areas of towns, throwing the inhabitants out on to the streets. From mid-1945, however, Russians caught raping women were liable to punishment. They might even suffer execution. Some were shot in the act, adding a further trauma to the victim of the sexual assault. A scale of charges was introduced in the summer of 1945, with ten days for debauchery and four years for aggravated rape. No German could report the crimes, however. When a group of young Germans prevented a rape by beating up the culprit, they were arrested and charged with being Werewolves. It was only in 1949 that Russian soldiers were presented with a real deterrent, with ten to fifteen years for simple rape and ten to twenty for raping a child, and for group or aggravated rape.43 The east Germans had been allowed their own police, but at the beginning these men were armed with nothing more potent than clubs and they were not encouraged to step in when the crime was being committed by a Soviet soldier. They were given a small number of guns in mid-1946.
The other continuing nightmare of the Soviet Zone was that the pillaging seemed unending. In Karlshorst pilfering was tolerated within certain limits and according to rank. A squaddie might steal a watch, a junior officer an accordion, but woe betide any of them who took more than he should. Cars were useless - ‘you couldn’t hide a car’ - and besides, it would have been nabbed by a superior officer.44 Some choice things did get stolen, especially if they could be consumed on the spot. One MVD officer, for example, boasted of having some of the finest wines from Göring’s cellar.45
Worse than the full-scale removal of the industrial base of the land was the abduction of men and women to develop industry in the Soviet Union. Some of the more vital scientists had surrendered to the West; the scientists who had created the V1 and V2 missiles at Peenemünde, for example, gave themselves up to the Americans in Bavaria. The Russians also found some useful personnel and they were prepared to overlook a man’s Nazi past if the scientist were prepared to work for them. They also lured them over with the promise of better housing. Technicians working at the Oberspreewerk in the west were offered homes in Hirschgarten near Köpenick.46
At first the Russians were successful in attracting scientists. The Germans were less enthusiastic when the round-ups began. They took place two days after abortive elections on 20 October 1946, when the SED had been soundly beaten. Soldiers came at 3.00 a.m. to deport all the leading electricians, toolmakers and engineers. The men and women were informed, ‘By order of the Russian High Command you have been mobilised for work in the Soviet Union. You are to leave at once, with your family. Your furniture and personal belongings will be moved to your new residence. The length of your stay will not exceed five years.’47 The size of the operation meant that they had not finished by five that afternoon. One of the places the Russians cordoned off that morning was Hirschgarten.
The Russians were able to take their pick of the skilled workers from GEMA (which manufactured range-finders and sights), ETEM (which made guidance equipment), AEG Kabelwerk (which created radio transmitters), OKG-4 (which made automatic pilots) and Askania (the radar manufacturers). Some of the Germans refused to go. In Halle they literally had to be clubbed into submission. Ninety-two special trains were laid on to transport the 5,000 men, women and children. Some of them were indeed back within five years, some came back in 1953. A few stayed until January 1958, about the time the first Sputnik went into orbit. German scientists were the fathers of both missile programmes, American and Russian.48 The SBZ did not necessarily approve of the kidnapping of these vital workers, but they had no control over the military. An attempt was made to stop the dismantling of Zeiss and the Schott optical works, but it was to no avail.49
The Russians also seized Walter Riedel of the glassworks of that name in Czechoslovakia. Riedel had invented fibreglass and worked on lenses and prism glass. His large-size picture tubes were used by the Luftwaffe as monitoring devices during the war. The Russians deemed Riedel a scientific VIP and ‘invited’ him to go to Russia after the war. He worked in a laboratory for a decade before he was allowed to go home. His firm had been seized by the Czechs. His son, Claus, had escaped detention in Austria and with the help of the Swarovski family was able to start up the family business again in Tyrolean Kufstein.50
Until 1946 it was theoretically impossible to cross into the Russian Zone without an ‘Interzone Pass’. It was a risky business, not least because of the danger of arrest or, for women, of rape by border guards. Despite that many people braved the unmanned ‘Green Border’ in order to reach their families. Margret Boveri crossed to her native Franconia, and Ursula von Kardorff managed to make it from Berlin, despite being shot at by Russian border guards. Some guards were more accessible, and were bought off with bottles of schnapps. The first sight of Russian rule in the east came as a shock. Germans wishing to travel had to get used to sitting on the roofs of trains, while Russians in clean uniforms occupied the half-empty carriages. In tunnels you learned to lie flat and keep your head down. The station signs were written in Cyrillic script, and policemen’s hats were embellished with the red star.
The life of the Gulag could be experienced in the Erzgebirge on the Czech border. This was another part of Germany that had originally fallen to Patton’s soldiers. The Americans retreated to Mulde on 12 May, but the Russians were slow to take their places and did not get there before the end of June. The Russians learned that the region contained uranium ore. This was an important discovery as ‘the Kremlin urgently requires atom bombs for its peace policies’. Initially 10,000 men, later 20,000 men and women, were forced to work in the mines; many of them were ethnic Germans from Hungary who were driven to work with kicks and beatings, and cries of ‘Davai! Davai!’ (Come on, move). Some of the women were whipped.
At the beginning of 1947 the whole western half of the region was cordoned off. More and more forced labourers were brought in. Some 20,000-30,000 Saxons were not deemed enough and recruiting offices were set up throughout the SBZ to procure the 75,000 men the Russians felt they needed. POWs returning from the east were sent straight off to the Erzgebirge, where they lived in makeshift barracks and tent camps similar to the places they had just left. The camps were at a great distance from the mines, and the workers had to rise at 3 a.m. to start the three-hour journey to the pithead. The work brought the men into contact with carcinogenic material and 20,000 people are believed to have died prematurely as a result of working in the mines. As it was eight men died in one week. The results were positive for the Soviets, however: on 23 August 1949 they were able to detonate their first atom bomb, using uranium from the mines at Wismut.51
In May 1945 the purging and recreation of the police force was the most important item on the agenda. At first the force was dominated by unarmed Socialist Party members, as the Allies had stipulated that the Germans were not to be issued with weapons. This made them
vulnerable to the bands of armed bandits. K-5 was the name of the political police which took over some of the functions of the Gestapo and would turn in time into the Ministry of State Security, or ‘Stasi’. The man behind it was Erich Mielke, a communist who had fled to Moscow after killing a policeman. There were already over 80,000 police in the SBZ by September 1947.52 If Mielke’s Stasi was to be the recreation of the Gestapo, another Nazi institution was to be rapidly dusted down and put back to work: the Hitler Youth. The youngish Erich Honecker was given the job of forming the FDJ, or Freie Deutsche Jugend.
Even more sinister were the many camps and prisons. Some of these had been simply carried over from Nazi times, like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. The Russian general Dratvin explained the facts to some British visitors: ‘The [Nazi] camps have been liquidated, but the buildings are being used for housing fascist criminals who have committed crimes against our country.’53 The traditional Nazi camps were joined by new creations like Hohenschönhausen in Berlin, which was also in a Soviet residential ghetto. It was here that Otto Grotewohl, SPD leader in the Soviet Zone, lived surrounded by Russians and barbed wire. Then there was Jamlitz was near Lieberose in the Uckermark, Forst in the Lausitz, Roitzsch-Bitterfeld, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Ketschendorf near Beeskow in the Mark, Neubrandenburg, Mühlberg on the Oder, Bautzen, Altenhain (which was used for Russian deserters and former members of Vlasov’s army), Stern-Buchholz near Schwerin and the old POW camp at Torgau which had been turned into a political prison. Hardened cases were transferred to the Soviet Union.
After the Reich Page 29