In contrast to districts in the very heart of the city that had suffered 50 to 75 per cent destruction, Spandau had lost only 10 per cent of its buildings. Although this meant that more than one thousand houses were either destroyed or unusable, by the standards of raid-toughened Berliners that was a mere flea bite. A caustic remark was current in the bomb-blackened wastelands of the central districts: “Die Spandauer Zwerge kommen zuletzt in die Särge,”—The little Spandauites are last to reach their coffins.
On Spandau’s westernmost fringe, in the quiet, pastoral subdistrict of Staaken, Robert and Ingeborg Kolb were more than grateful to live in a kind of backwater. The only bombs that had fallen even close were those that missed the nearby airfield—and the damage was slight. Their two-story orange and brown stucco home, with its glass-enclosed veranda and its surrounding lawn and garden, remained unharmed. Life went on almost normally —except that Robert, the 54-year-old technical director of a printing plant, was finding the daily trip to his job in the city’s center increasingly arduous. It meant running the gamut of the daylight raids. It was a constant worry to Ingeborg.
This evening the Kolbs planned, as usual, to listen to the German-language broadcasts of the BBC, although it was a practice long forbidden. Step by step they had followed the Allied advances from east and west. Now the Red Army was only a bus ride from the city’s eastern outskirts. Yet, lulled by the rural atmosphere of their surroundings, they found the imminent threat to the city unthinkable, the war remote and unreal. Robert Kolb was convinced they were quite safe and Ingeborg was convinced that Robert was always right. After all, he was a veteran of World War I. “The war,” Robert had assured her, “will pass us by.”
Quite certain that no matter what happened they would not be involved, the Kolbs calmly looked to the future. Now that spring was here, Robert was trying to decide where to hang the hammocks in the garden. Ingeborg had chores of her own to do: she planned to plant spinach, parsley, lettuce and early potatoes. There was one major problem : should she sow the early potatoes in the first part of April or wait until the more settled spring days of May?
At his headquarters in a gray stucco, three-story house on the outskirts of Landsberg, twenty-five miles from the Oder, Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgi K. Zhukov sat at his desk pondering some plans of his own. On one wall, a large map of Berlin showed in detail Zhukov’s proposed offensive to capture the city. On his desk were three field phones. One was for general use; another linked him to his colleagues: Marshals Konstantin Rokossovskii and Ivan Stepanovich Koniev, commanders of the huge army groups on his northern and southern flanks. The third phone was a direct line to Moscow and the Supreme Commander, Josef Stalin. The barrel-chested 49-year-old commander of the First Belorussian Front spoke to Stalin each night at eleven, reporting the day’s advances. Now Zhukov wondered how soon Stalin would give the command to take Berlin. He hoped he still had some time. At a pinch Zhukov thought he could take the city immediately, but he was not quite ready. Tentatively, he had planned the attack for around the end of April. With luck, he thought he could reach Berlin and reduce all resistance within ten or twelve days. The Germans would contest him for every inch—that he expected. Probably they would fight hardest on the western edge of the city. There, as far as he could see, lay the only clear-cut escape route for the German defenders. But he planned to hit them from both sides as they tried to get out. By the first week of May he anticipated wholesale slaughter in the district of Spandau.
In his second-floor Wilmersdorf apartment, Carl Johann Wiberg pushed open the shuttered French windows of his living room, stepped out onto the little balcony and took stock of the weather. With him were his constant companions, Uncle Otto and Aunt Effie, two waddling, liver-colored dachshunds. They looked up at him expectantly, waiting for their morning walk.
Walking was about all Wiberg did to pass the time these days. Everyone in the neighborhood liked the 49-year-old Swedish businessman. They considered him a “good Berliner” first, a Swede second: he had not left the city like so many other foreigners when the bombing began. Moreover, although Wiberg never complained about his troubles, his neighbors knew that he had lost almost everything. His wife had died in 1939. His glue factories had been bombed out of business. After thirty years as a small businessman in Berlin, he had little left now but his dogs and the apartment. In the opinion of some of his neighbors he was a better man than many a true German.
Wiberg looked down at Uncle Otto and Aunt Effie. “Time to go out,” he said. He closed the windows and walked across the living room to the little foyer. He put on his beautifully tailored Chesterfield and settled his carefully brushed Homburg on his head. Opening the drawer of a polished mahogany hall table, he took out a pair of suede gloves and for a moment stood looking at a framed lithograph lying inside the drawer.
The print, sketched in flamboyant colors, showed a fully armored knight mounted on a rampaging white stallion. Attached to the knight’s lance was a streaming banner. Through the helmet’s open visor the knight gazed fiercely out. A lock of hair fell over his forehead; he had piercing eyes and a small black moustache. Across the waving banner were the words, “Der Bannerträger”—The Standard Bearer.
Wiberg slowly closed the drawer. He kept the lithograph hidden because the derisive lampoon of Hitler was banned throughout Germany. But Wiberg did not want to get rid of it; the caricature was too amusing to throw away.
Snapping leashes on the dogs, he locked the front door carefully behind him, and went down the two flights of stairs and into the rubble of the street. Near the apartment house he doffed his hat to some neighbors and, with the dogs leading, made his way down the street, stepping carefully around the potholes. He wondered where Der Bannerträger was now that the end seemed near. In Munich? At his Eagle’s Nest in the mountains at Berchtesgaden? Or, here, in Berlin? No one seemed to know—although that was not surprising. Hitler’s whereabouts was always a big secret.
This morning Wiberg decided to drop in at his favorite bar, Harry Rosse’s at 7 Nestorstrasse—one of the few left open in the district. It had a varied clientele: Nazi bigwigs, German officers, and a smattering of businessmen. There was always good conversation and one could catch up on the latest news—where last night’s bombs had fallen, which factories had been hit, how Berlin was standing up under it all. Wiberg liked meeting his old friends in this convivial atmosphere and he was interested in just about every aspect of the war, especially the effects of the bombings and the morale of the German people. In particular he wanted to know where Hitler was. As he crossed the street he once again tipped his hat to an old acquaintance. Despite all the questions that crowded his mind, Wiberg knew a few things that would have surprised his neighbors. For this Swede who was more German than the Germans was also a member of America’s top-secret Office of Strategic Services. He was an Allied spy.
In his ground-floor apartment in Kreuzberg, Dr. Arthur Leckscheidt, Evangelical pastor of the Melanchthon Church, was beset by grief and despair. His twin-spired Gothic church was destroyed and his flock dissipated. Through the windows he could see the remains of his church. A few weeks before it had received a direct hit and, minutes later, incendiaries had set it ablaze. The sorrow he felt each time he looked at it had not yet abated. At the height of the raid, oblivious of his own safety, Pastor Leckscheidt had rushed into the blazing church. The back of the edifice and its magnificent organ were still intact. Running swiftly up the narrow steps to the organ loft, Leckscheidt had but one thought: to bid farewell to his beloved organ and to the church. Singing softly to himself, eyes filled with tears, Dr. Leckscheidt played his farewell. As bombs burst all over Kreuzberg, incredulous patients in the nearby Urban Hospital and people sheltering in adjacent cellars heard the Melanchthon organ pealing out the ancient hymn, “From Deepest Need I Cry to Thee.”
Now he was saying a different kind of good-bye. On his desk was the draft of a round-robin letter he would send to those many parishioners who had left t
he city or were in the armed forces. “Even though fighting in the east and west is keeping us in tension,” he wrote, “the German capital is constantly the center of air raids … you can imagine, dear friends, that death is reaping a rich harvest. Coffins have become a scarcity. A woman told me that she had offered twenty pounds of honey for one in which to lay her deceased husband.”
Dr. Leckscheidt was also angered. “We ministers are not always called to burials of air raid victims,” he wrote. “Often the Party takes over the funerals without a minister … without God’s word.” And again and again throughout his letter, he referred to the devastation of the city. “You cannot imagine what Berlin looks like now. The loveliest buildings have crumbled into ruins…. Often we have no gas, light or water. God keep us from a famine! Terrific prices are asked for black-market commodities.” And he ended on a note of bitter pessimism: “This is probably the last letter for a long time. Perhaps we shall soon be cut off from all communication. Shall we see each other again? It all rests in God’s hands.”
Cycling purposefully through the littered streets of Dahlem, another clergyman, Father Bernhard Happich, had decided to take matters into his own hands. A delicate problem had worried him for weeks. Night after night he had prayed for guidance and meditated on the course he should take. Now he had reached a decision.
The services of all clergymen were in great demand, but this was particularly true of Father Happich. The 55-year-old priest, who carried the words “Jesuit: not fit for military service” stamped across his identity card (a Nazi imprint like that reserved for Jews and other dangerous undesirables), was also a highly skilled doctor of medicine. Among his many other duties he was the Father Provincial of Haus Dahlem, the orphanage, maternity hospital and foundling home run by the Mission Sisters of the Sacred Heart. It was Mother Superior Cunegundes and her flock who had brought about his problem, and his decision.
Father Happich had no illusions about the Nazis or how the war must surely end. He had long ago decided that Hitler and his brutal new order were destined for disaster. Now the crisis was fast approaching. Berlin was trapped—the tarnished chalice in the conqueror’s eye. What would happen to Haus Dahlem and its good, but less than worldly, Sisters?
His face serious, Father Happich pulled up outside the home. The building had suffered only superficial damage and the Sisters were convinced that their prayers were being heard. Father Happich did not disagree with them, but being a practical man he thought that luck and bad marksmanship might have had something to do with it.
As he passed through the entrance hall he looked up at the great statue, garbed in blue and gold, sword held high—Saint Michael, “God’s fighting knight against all evil.” The Sisters’ faith in Saint Michael was well founded, but just the same Father Happich was glad he had made his decision. Like everyone else he had heard from refugees who had fled before the advancing Russians of the horrors that had taken place in eastern Germany. Many of the accounts were exaggerated, he was sure, but some he knew to be true. Father Happich had decided to warn the Sisters. Now he had to choose the right moment to tell them, and above all he had to find the right words. Father Happich worried about that. How do you tell sixty nuns and lay sisters that they are in danger of being raped?
3
THE FEAR OF SEXUAL ATTACK lay over the city like a pall, for Berlin, after nearly six years of war, was now primarily a city of women.
At the beginning, in 1939, there were 4,321,000 inhabitants of the capital. But huge war casualties, the call-up of both men and women and the voluntary evacuation of one million citizens to the safer countryside in 1943-44 had cut that figure by more than one third. By now the only males left in any appreciable number were children under eighteen and men over sixty. The 18-to-30 male age group totaled barely 100,000 and most of them were exempt from military service or wounded. In January, 1945, the city’s population had been estimated at 2,900,000 but now, in mid-March, that figure was certainly too high. After eighty-five raids in less than eleven weeks and with the threat of siege hanging over the city, thousands more had fled. Military authorities estimated that Berlin’s civil population was now about 2,700,000, of whom more than 2,000,000 were women—and even that was only an informed guess.
Complicating efforts to obtain a true population figure was the vast exodus of refugees from the Soviet-occupied eastern provinces. Some put the refugee figure as high as 500,000. Uprooted, carrying their belongings on their backs or in horse-drawn wagons or pushcarts, often driving farm animals before them, fleeing civilians had clogged the roads into Berlin for months. Most did not remain in the city, but continued west. But in their wake they left a repository of nightmarish stories; these accounts of their experiences had spread like an epidemic through Berlin, infecting many citizens with terror.
The refugees told of a vengeful, violent and rapacious conqueror. People who had trekked from as far away as Poland, or from the captured parts of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, gave bitter testimony of an enemy who offered no quarter. In fact, the refugees declared, Russian propaganda was urging the Red Army to spare no one. They told of a manifesto, said to have been written by the Soviet Union’s top propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, which was both broadcast and distributed in leaflet form to the Red troops. “Kill! Kill!” went the manifesto. “In the German race there is nothing but evil! … Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these Germanic women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill! You gallant soldiers of the Red Army.” *
The refugees reported that advancing front-line troops were well disciplined and well behaved, but that the secondary units that followed were a disorganized rabble. In wild, drunken orgies these Red Army men had murdered, looted and raped. Many Russian commanders, the refugees claimed, appeared to condone the actions of their men. At least they made no effort to stop them. From peasants to gentry the accounts were the same, and everywhere in the flood of refugees there were women who told chilling stories of brutal assault—of being forced at gunpoint to strip and then submit to repeated rapings.
How much was fantasy, how much fact? Berliners were not sure. Those who knew of the atrocities and mass murders committed by German SS troops in Russia—and there were thousands who knew—feared that the stories were true. Those who were aware of what was happening to the Jews in concentration camps —a new and horrible aspect of National Socialism of which the free world was yet to learn—believed the refugees, too. These more knowledgeable Berliners could well believe that the oppressor was becoming the oppressed, that the wheel of retribution was swinging full circle. Many who knew the extent of the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich were taking no chances. Highly placed bureaucrats and top-ranking Nazi officials had quietly moved their families out of Berlin or were in the process of doing so.
Fanatics still remained, and the average Berliners, less privy to information and ignorant of the true situation, were also staying. They could not or would not leave. “Oh Germany, Germany, my Fatherland,” wrote Erna Saenger, a 65-year-old housewife and mother of six children, in her diary, “Trust brings disappointment. To believe faithfully means to be stupid and blind … but … we’ll stay in Berlin. If everyone left like the neighbors the enemy would have what he wants. No—we don’t want that kind of defeat.”
Yet few Berliners could claim to be unaware of the nature of the danger. Almost everyone had heard the stories. One couple, Hugo and Edith Neumann, living in Kreuzberg, actually had been informed by telephone. Some relatives living in the Russian-occupied zone had risked their lives, shortly before all communications ceased, to warn the Neumanns that the conquerors were raping, killing and looting without restraint. Yet the Neumanns stayed. Hugo’s electrical business had been bombed, but to abandon it now was unthinkable.
Others chose to dismiss the stories because propaganda, whether spread by refugees or inspired by the government, h
ad little or no meaning for them any longer. From the moment Hitler ordered the unprovoked invasion of Russia in 1941, all Germans had been subjected to a relentless barrage of hate propaganda. The Soviet people were painted as uncivilized and subhuman. When the tide turned and German troops were forced back on all fronts in Russia, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s club-footed propaganda chief, intensified his efforts—particularly in Berlin.
Goebbels’ assistant, Dr. Werner Naumann, privately admitted that “our propaganda as to what the Russians are like, as to what the population can expect from them in Berlin, has been so successful that we have reduced the Berliners to a state of sheer terror.” By the end of 1944 Naumann felt that “we have overdone it—our propaganda has ricocheted against us.”
Now the tone of the propaganda had changed. As Hitler’s empire was sheared off piece by piece, as Berlin was demolished, block by block, Goebbels had begun to switch from terror-mongering to reassurance; now the people were told that victory was just around the corner. About all Goebbels succeeded in doing was to generate among cosmopolitan Berliners a grotesque, macabre kind of humor. It took the form of a large, collective raspberry which the population derisively directed at themselves, their leaders and the world. Berliners quickly changed Goebbels’ motto, “The Führer Commands, We Follow,” to “The Führer Commands, We Bear What Follows.” As for the propaganda chief’s promises of ultimate victory, the irreverent solemnly urged all to “Enjoy the war, the peace will be terrible.”
In the atmosphere of near-panic created by the refugees’ reports, facts and reason became distorted as rumor took over. All sorts of atrocity stories spread throughout the city. Russians were described as slant-eyed Mongols who butchered women and children on sight. Clergymen were said to have been burned to death with flamethrowers; the stories told of nuns raped and then forced to walk naked through the streets; of how women were made camp followers and all males marched off to servitude in Siberia. There was even a radio report that the Russians had nailed victims’ tongues to tables. The less impressionable found the tales too fantastic to believe.
The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin Page 2