Year Zero: Berlin 1945

by David McCormack

  Richard Brett-Smith, a young officer serving with the 11th Hussars in Berlin (July 1945 – March 1946) was a keen observer and chronicler of Berlin life. His observations go some way towards explaining the attitude of the average Berlin citizen towards defeat and occupation :

  In Berlin I found most people more resilient than in other German cities, and certainly as quick-witted, sharp, and cheerful as the London Cockney. Perhaps Berlin is the one place in Germany where a sense of humour near to that of the English is often found. It was amazing that in 1945 a people in such straits could laugh at all, and miraculous that they should laugh at and make jokes about their own troubles and afflictions, such as the Russians, the Black Market, the Red Caps (British Military Police) or 'Snowballs' (American Military Police) and food rationing... To me, it was the Berliners' sense of humour and individuality which most distinguished him from other Prussians. So often it depends upon a lampooning of authority with that wry cynicism about one's own plight

  The wry wit which Brett-Smith observed was both an acknowledgement by Berliners of their own much reduced circumstances and their resilience in the face of adversity. They had survived the bombing and the coming of the Soviet armies. Through their humour, toughness and adaptability, they would survive the occupation too.

  Hitler once said, 'Give me ten years and you won't recognise this country'. In the event, Hitler's dictatorship lasted twelve years, by which time the country was indeed unrecognisable. The great cities of Germany lay in ruins. Factories were either destroyed or lay idle due to acute shortages of fuel and raw materials. Public utilities had ceased to function. Life revolved around securing the basic necessities of food, shelter and warmth. People lived a troglodyte existence in the cellars of bombed and burnt-out buildings. As they scurried around the ruins like ants, thick dust clung to their clothes and faces, giving them a ghostly appearance. The celebrated war correspondent Alan Moorhead described life in these shattered German cities as 'sordid, aimless, leading nowhere'.

  During the first eight months of the Allied occupation, there was hunger amongst the population, but no famine. There were incidents of diseases such as typhoid fever, typhus and diphtheria, but not on an endemic scale. Statistics compiled by the British authorities provided valuable information regarding disease, suicide, crime and employment rates. However, first hand observations of the reality of life in post-war Berlin were more valuable still. Brett-Smith's recollections say far more than bare statistics ever can. In his memoir, one particular passage vividly encapsulates the daily struggle faced by ordinary Berliners :

  I see in my mind an old woman grubbing among the swill-tubs near a soldiers' mess, until warned off, for this food is for the pigs; a vamp collapsing in a night-club from drinking two glasses of wine on a stomach that had been empty for two days from necessity, not from folly: a free fight among half a dozen citizens, men and women of varying age and children too, which started after four potatoes had rolled off a cornering British Army three-cornered. Two old men, fag end collectors, knocking heads as they both dive for a cigarette stump thrown from a passing Jeep. Corpses of refugees in cattle trucks at the Lehrter Station – had they died from starvation or from cold? These instances could be multiplied.

  The hunger experienced by the population led in some extreme circumstances to serious crime, including murder. Between May and December 1945, between fifty and sixty murders were committed in Berlin every month. Most of the murders had robbery as their prime motive. Indeed, there had been a spate of armed robberies on the S-Bahn system by multinational gangs. The arming of the German police in early 1946 led to a substantial reduction in the murder rate, though not in other serious crimes. Organised and opportunistic vehicle theft remained a serious issue for the occupying authorities as Brett-Smith recalled :

  It was courting disaster to leave a Jeep parked in the street without having immobilised it. Sometimes even that precaution did not prevent thieves from towing it away or removing all four tyres and the spare, and there were even some who, having padlocked their steering-wheel with a grim satisfaction an hour or so earlier, laughed on the other side of their faces when they returned to find steering-column and padlock arranged on the kerb, but no sign of a car.

  As winter approached, coal thefts rose dramatically. Until conditions in the city improved markedly, the needy, the desperate, the opportunists and the unscrupulous would continue their illegal activities.

  Chapter Twelve

  Corruption in low places

  Black market trading and prostitution proliferated across Berlin. To some extent, the American and Soviet occupying forces were responsible for the growth of the black market as they had allowed barter-shops to operate freely. This growing trade went some way to satisfying not just the needs of the population, but the occupying troops themselves. For the average soldier serving with the occupying forces, Berlin was an opportunity not to be missed. Like many others, American G.I. Peter Wyden profited from the burgeoning black market. However, unlike many of his colleagues working on a German language newspaper for the military administration, he felt uneasy about exploiting others for profit :

  My worst discomfort was ethical. I didn't like what the occupation was doing to me and my colleagues. We were becoming corrupted and we were liking it. Quite a few were becoming rich – I mean truly wealthy. I knew no one who wasn't trading in the black market. American PX cigarettes (rationed but generously so) were the preferred medium of exchange. A few smokes paid for anything, including women, some of them respectable. Prices were quoted as on a stock exchange for our full inventory : GI shirts and socks, even Zagnut candy bars issued by the PX, although they seemed to consist of bone glue. Army friends stationed outside Berlin were jealous of us because they couldn't share the action. They sent us merchandise for sale on a commission basis. Anything went for preposterous prices in Berlin; among the items delivered to my office for immediate clearance were a set of used dentures and an aerial camera freshly dismounted from a Luftwaffe bomber

  Wyden was a small time player on the black market scene. Like many others, he simply wanted to get something out of a posting he had never asked for in the first place. Like many others, he was able to rationalise what he was doing, and by doing so set any qualms he had aside.

  For some of those posted to Berlin, the black market was an opportunity to experience the thrill of illicit trading. In his unpublished memoir, R.A.F. radio operator John (Jack) Hanwell recounted his own experience of the Berlin black market :

  At one end of the Kurfurstendamm was Berlin's main black market area. A pack of cigarettes or a tin of corned beef could easily be bartered for jewellery and other valuables. By the early evening it was heaving with people... Through the black market, I obtained a Walther pistol with six or seven rounds in the magazine, some opal earrings with a matching necklace, a couple of Leica cameras and some porcelain crockery...

  The experience of this young wireless operator is fairly typical. As such, he cannot be compared to the legendary (and probably mythical) Lance Corporal who was said to have been the proud owner of whole apartment blocks in the eastern part of the city. Whilst there were undoubtedly some very dubious activities going on, most trading on the black market was innocent enough. Soldiers are known for their love of souvenirs. There was a particularly brisk trade in wrist-watches between American and Soviet troops. Colonel Frank Howley (American sector commandant) later explained the background to this trade :

  On the Russian G.I's level, the immediate goal was a watch. Russians love watches for a number of reasons. They have always been associated in the Muscovite mind with affluence and an established, even exalted, position in life. Peasants never owned watches! A wrist-watch – well! Watches soon became a universal commodity because troops had no confidence in the Russian currency. Also, a soldier could send a watch home and his wife could barter it for a cow. Even our G.I's realised the fortune, in Russian eyes, represented by a watch and started to sell their own watches, c
onverting the money into American dollars, although the men were forbidden to enter these markets... A Mickey Mouse watch was worth more than a jewel-studded trinket from Cartier.

  Such was the extent of trade with the Soviet occupying troops, that the authorities tended to turn a blind eye. Although, there were occasional high profile raids on established black market areas in the Tiergarten, Alexander-Platz, Potsdamer-Platz, Friedrichstrasse and the Kurfurstendamm.

  In October 1945, the ban on fraternisation with the German population in Berlin was lifted. Predictably, there was an explosion in prostitution with approximately 500,000 women working the streets and clubs by the end of the year. Considering that many of the occupations available to women in the immediate post-war period involved the fetishisation of their bodies in the seedy clubs which proliferated, it is not surprising that many took the next logical step by turning to prostitution. Some dressed their activities in an aura of romance as they secretly hoped that they would be whisked away by an American or British soldier who wanted to marry them. One married British Private later recalled his feelings over an affair with an eighteen year old German girl :

  I felt a bit sick at times about the power I had over that girl. If I gave her a three-penny bar of chocolate she nearly went crazy. She was just like my slave. She darned my socks and mended my things. There was no question of marriage. She knew that it was not possible.

  The comments by the married Private accurately reflect the moral double-standards of the time. This eighteen year old girl was good enough for sex, but quite unsuitable for marriage. Some Germans lamented the apparent collapse in traditional moral standards. In Hitler's Germany, a woman's place was determined by the so-called three K's (Kinder, Kuche and Kirche), which translated to children, home and church. One German police official stated :

  It is impossible to distinguish between good girls and bad girls in Germany. Even nice girls of good families, good education and fine background have discovered their bodies afford the only real living. Moral standards have crashed to a new low level. At the present rate, in two months time I wonder if there will be a decent moral woman left.

  The police officials comments display a staggering lack of understanding for the reasons why so many women prostituted themselves. Terms such as 'good', 'bad' and 'nice' ceased to mean anything as so many women from all strata of society could be bought cheaply. In this new world, an impoverished Baroness might struggle to find work as a waitress in a seedy club. Traditional social roles became blurred as nearly all women faced the same struggle for survival.

  Wives longed for their husbands to return. However, when their menfolk finally returned from captivity, they could not comprehend what their partners had endured. They had no inkling of the initial explosion of sexual violence. Nor could they understand the desperate shortages of everyday necessities which had forced their loved ones into finding protection and sustenance in the arms of a Soviet officer or soldier. How could they have demeaned themselves in this way? Therefore, for many, there was no joyful reunion, but blame, accusation, recrimination, and ultimately, separation. When we think of the end of the war in Europe, we tend to picture the joyous scenes in Trafalgar Square or the ecstatic crowds thronging Times Square in New York. Such scenes befitted the hard fought for victory won by the Allies. In Berlin, the very different scenes witnessed by chroniclers of events characterised the trauma and degradation of defeat.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Renaissance

  In Berlin, the extent of the devastation was almost too much to comprehend. Several months after the end of hostilities, some basic services had been restored, but life remained a daily struggle. Brett-Smith was both amazed and impressed by how people managed to live in the midst of such widespread devastation. He wrote :

  Houses that were nothing but empty shells or gutted skeletons emitted cave-dwellers from their basements, and how often did you not see and notice with surprise that one room in a whole block of flats was still occupied, the rest being ruins, and the survivor betrayed only by the glow of an electric bulb or by the dismal line of washing hanging outside! Indeed some dwellings were so invisible to the eye, their entrances down slopes or steps concealed by weeds, bushes, or stones, that you felt you had been pitchforked back many centuries into the company of Neanderthal man. Fully to realise the devastation you had to leave Berlin for a few weeks, and then, on returning, you saw it with new eyes. Living among so much ruin you tended to become oblivious to it all. Yet you could walk for miles in the middle of the city, starting, say, from the Brandenburger Tor or from the Belle Alliance-Platz, and see nothing but destruction, with the sour smell of death and corruption rising from the Spree, which was hardly more than an open sewer. But among it all life was going on, shops were springing up (though heavens knew where they found anything to sell) and blades of grass poked up through the rubble.

  However, it was from above that the devastation of Berlin could best be appreciated. Brett-Smith went on to describe his own impressions of the ruined city from the air :

  ...As your plane climbed sharply away, or came in to land over the streets of Berlin, it seemed to you as you looked down as if some fantastic collection of empty match-boxes and hollow bricks from a child's nursery had been shuffled together and strewn about, densely but untidily, for many of them were upended or bent. From a little farther away this gallimaufry took on an apparent symmetry, so that an arriving visitor at first would be deceived by the regularity of the cratered landscape below him, and would not realise that the orderliness was only an orderliness of destruction, of absence of roofs and walls and outstanding landmarks. Many church spires and various towers still survived, it is true, whether above their own shattered foundations or, less frequently, on the summits of whole buildings, but much of the usual give and take, as it were, of a city's outline had disappeared.

  Such was the devastation in Berlin, that there appeared no future for the city, only the present, dominated as it was by the ruins which began to take on a permanent appearance. Yet, in this city of smashed monuments and ruined buildings, life in the form of culture, religion and politics emerged from the cellars.

  The desperate need to escape the drudgery of daily life in Berlin led to an artistic revival in the city. Under National Socialism, music had been the subject of strict regulation. Scores by Jewish composers were prohibited. New musical trends were also frowned upon, particularly 'degenerate' jazz which was seen as a damaging foreign import. Now, following the collapse of Hitler's Wagnerian fantasy, music of all types flourished. There was a great revival in classical music, in which the previously proscribed works of Mendelssohn were greeted with enthusiasm bordering on ecstasy. In the Theatre des Westens in Charlottenburg, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Professor Robert Hager and Sergiu Celibidache played to entranced audiences, eager to be a part of the classical revival. Leo Borchard, the orchestra's senior conductor had been shot dead by an American sentry in one of those stupid and silly incidents which were a less than rare occurrence in those early days of the occupation. Borchard had been travelling as a passenger in a British vehicle, whose driver failed to respond to the American sentry's challenge.

  Jazz music also flourished. During the era of cultural prohibition, it had been the outlet for the frustrations of dissident groups such as the 'Swing Kids'. Now, it proliferated in the numerous establishments that had sprung up between Adolf-Hitler-Platz (later renamed as Theodor-Heuss-Platz) and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at the end of the Kurfurstendamm. Not everyone embraced jazz as there were those who were still influenced by Goebbels' propaganda. For the most part, it was the younger generation who saw jazz as a vehicle for releasing desires and emotions which had been suppressed by the social mores of the National Socialist state. For these people, jazz represented freedom, individuality and modernism.

  In the summer of 1945, jazz musician Coco Schumann returned to his native Berlin. Schumann had been an active member of the underground ja
zz scene. In 1943, he was denounced as being half-Jewish and subsequently deported to the holding camp at Theresienstadt and then on to Auschwitz. Here, he came face-to-face with the infamous Dr Josef Mengele. He was saved from the gas chambers by a chance encounter with a guard, who, being a one-time jazz fan recognised Schumann from his many appearances on the underground music scene. The guard placed Schumann in a Roma musical group. Whilst a member of the group, he played tunes such a 'La Poloma' for the guards who were supervising the murder of hundreds of thousands of people during the last six months of 1944. Schumann later stated that, 'For a long time, I suppressed what I saw – the eyes of children who were led to the gas chamber, the bodies being offloaded'. Delirious with spotted fever, Schumann almost succumbed just as the liberators were arriving. Yet, he survived and returned to war ravaged Berlin where he met his future wife whilst walking along the Kurfurstendamm. After spending several years in Australia, Schumann and his wife returned to Berlin. He quickly re-established himself on the Berlin jazz scene and in time became Germany's most renowned swing guitarist.

  In the early stages of the occupation the Allies worked in tandem to support the revival of cultural life in Berlin. The Soviet authorities of course had a head start. As early as 16 May, orders were issued granting permission for theatre performances to take place. On 18 May, the first classical music concert took place in the city. On the following day, some thirty of the surviving cinemas reopened. The theme of cultural revival was the basis of an interview by Amy Beal with former Berlin Philharmonic double bassist Erich Hartmann in 2006. When asked about the context of the cultural revival, Hartmann stated :