"Ivanov, all the way from Stalingrad", or "Mikhailov who fought the Fritzes in the Battle of Kursk", or "Petrov, Leningrad to Berlin", and so on. There were Russian soldiers'
graves in the Tiergarten, around the Reichstag; and along the main streets, especially in the busier and less devastated streets of East Berlin, notices had been put up everywhere:
"HITLERS COME AND GO, BUT THE GERMAN PEOPLE AND THE GERMAN
STATE GO ON.—STALIN." The reference to the "German State" made many Germans believe that there would soon be a central German government. There were German
policemen with white brassards at street corners, and a few tramcars and a couple of underground lines were running. Water was being pumped out of other underground lines which had been flooded on Hitler's orders and in which a large number of people had
been drowned as a result.
There was much army traffic in the main streets and there were also the wheelbarrows—
hundreds of them—of Germans moving their belongings from one place to another.
There were also lorries packed with D.P.'s. The Germans looked subdued; only once in a while one caught the glimpse of a dirty look. Most of them were busy: they were clearing away rubble and mending pavements.
There was more mateyness between the Russians and the Germans than one would have
expected. At street corners soldiers were seen chatting with German men and girls; they were not supposed to sleep with German girls, though they could at their own risk and peril—and they did. Small German boys and elderly women were the most boisterous of
all. The boys would scrounge food and cigarettes off the Russians, and the elderly women displayed a sort of motherly familiarity. They waved at Russian lorries for lifts, and the lorries would often stop.
Colonel-General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, was a fine specimen of a Soviet
general.
[He was to be killed in a car smash only a week later; that, at any rate, was the official version. Many Russians in Berlin suspected that he had, in reality, been assassinated by Nazi terrorists.]
He was, quite obviously, not at all pleased at the prospect that Berlin would soon have to be shared with the British, Americans and French. He felt that as the Russians had lost thousands in the fierce final battle of the war they deserved Berlin all to themselves. He also felt that he had made as good a job as possible of Berlin in the incredible
circumstances of May 1945, and that things were beginning to take shape. The arrival of the others would only cause a lot of rivalry and friction, and undermine the Russians'
authority with the Germans...
Anyway, Berzarin was not the kind of man who had much use for the Allies, least of all the British. The son of a Leningrad steel worker, and a Party member of long standing, he had joined the Red Army in 1918 at the age of 14, and, in 1919, he had fought the British at Archangel. "Yes," he said, "I had to fight there against our present allies. At first we got it in the neck from them, but later I realised what good athletes they were—they could certainly run!" In 1939 he had fought at Halkin Gol; in 1941, he commanded a Russian army at Riga, "and there I got my first knock from the Germans, and it was a pretty hard knock, I can tell you." Then he fought on various other fronts—and, finally,
"our army was the first to reach the Oder, and it was we to whom the Germans in Berlin finally capitulated last month."
"But it was heavy going," he went on. "Our artillery and infantry won this battle. The allied bombing caused great damage here, but it was of no direct military value. The allied dropped 65,000 tons of bombs on Berlin, but it was we who, in a fortnight, fired 40,000 tons of shells at it. With tanks and guns we had to smash up whole houses. The Germans were fanatical. Young boys and girls threw hand-grenades at us and attacked
our tanks with their infernal near-suicidal jaustpatronen. There were a lot of barricades all over Berlin. Finally, they capitulated on May 2. A large part of the population and thousands of soldiers were hiding in cellars and shelters. But even after the capitulation some SS-men and Hitler youths continued to fire at us from the ruins. This went on for a few days. Since then, there are still occasionally assassinations of Russian soldiers and especially officers; but, on the whole, everything is quiet... "
He admitted that, to put an end to these assassinations, the Russians had had to take hostages from amongst the numerous Nazis.
Berzarin claimed that in May 1945 the Russians had saved Berlin from starvation. He
gave figures for the gradual restoration of the underground-railway, tramlines,
telephones, gas supply, etc.—and then spoke of the rations. Every person received 0.75
lb. of potatoes a day, but the other rations among the five categories varied greatly: bread from 20 oz. to 10 oz., meat from 3 oz. to 0.66 oz., sugar from 1 oz. to 0.5 oz. Some food even had to be brought from Russia.
"But before long," Berzarin said, "the Red Army, now largely depending on its own supplies, will have to be fed by the Germans, and we are making the peasants grow as much as possible." He was planning to allow a "free market" in Berlin, which would encourage the peasants to bring their produce to the city.
The population of Berlin was already nearly three millions, and more people were
coming in all the time. The health services were a major problem: all doctors had been mobilised, and there were 40,000 wounded Germans in Berlin in special hospitals.
Housing was, of course, the worst problem of all: forty-five percent of Berlin's houses had been totally destroyed, thirty-five percent partly destroyed, and only some fifteen or twenty percent, mostly in the suburbs, were more or less intact. There was no work for most of the population, who were being used for clearing away rubble.
He also made it clear that it was "well worthwhile" under the Russians to be emphatically anti-Nazi, and all bona fide anti-Nazis were being highly favoured.
Anti-Nazis are being used by us for checking all appointments, particularly to the police force. The policemen are carefully chosen; even so, they are allowed to carry only truncheons, not firearms. In smaller jobs we allow nominal, non-active Nazis to remain. All ex-Nazis must report for work.
The cultural side is being developed; there are 200 cinemas in Berlin, and we show them Russian films, such as Ivan the Terrible. The centre of musical activity is the Radio Centre; here the German opera orchestra has been reconstituted under the
conductor Ludwig. Schools will be restored as soon as possible; but all the Nazi
school-books will have to be replaced. The problem of finding enough anti-Nazi
teachers will not be easy.
We have organised the municipality, complete with an Oberbürgermeister, a Dr Werner and, under him, sixteen departments—food, health, industry, trade,
administration, education, etc.
There was both comedy and pathos about the Town Hall of Berlin, in a former Insurance building, which had somehow escaped destruction, somewhere off the Alexanderplatz.
The Oberbürgermeister, Herr Werner, was a gaunt handsome old man of sixty-eight, wearing a long black frock coat, a stiff butterfly collar and black tie. He was a wealthy rentier with a villa at Lichterfelde, and the Russians got hold of him several days before entering Berlin proper, and had appointed him Oberbürgermeister.
[The Berlin City Government was composed of seven bourgeois, six Communist Party officials, two Social-Democrats and two nonparty members. Two were German
communists who had spent years in a Nazi concentration camp, but most of the other
communists were "Moscow" Germans. According to Wolfgang Leonhard, at that time a close associate of Ulbricht's, it was the "Ulbricht Group", working in close co-operation with the Russians, who were chiefly responsible for the appointments. It was also
Ulbricht who insisted, in June 1945, on the dissolution of the "anti-fascist committees"
who had constituted themselves in Berlin spontaneously and "from below", and on th
eir virtual replacement by the political parties, as authorised by Zhukov. It was these parties, especially the Communist Party, which were to provide administrative cadres for the
Soviet Zone. (Wolfgang Leonhard, op. cit., pp. 323-35).]
He said he had lived well till 1942, and had had a large income, but then hard times came, and he had lost 60 lbs. in weight. The constant bombings of Berlin had got him down. Now he was saying all the right things. General Berzarin had "done him the great honour" of appointing him Oberbürgermeister of Berlin. The feeding of Berlin was a terrible problem, since the Nazis had destroyed all the food-stores, saying: "While we are here you'll have food, but when the Bolsheviks take over, you'll starve". But things were not nearly as bad as the Germans—very frightened at first—had expected. The Red Army had presented Berlin with a thousand lorries for clearing the rubble and doing some
reconstruction, and they had placed a car at his (Werner's) disposal, since he lived ten miles from his office and also a bodyguard of six soldiers. He also said: "Marshal Stalin gave us twenty-five million marks, and the Marshal's magnanimous gesture has been
deeply appreciated by all Berliners." By the end of the summer, schools would be opened, "and when I raised the question of religious tuition with General Berzarin, he said, 'You can educate them in a religious spirit for all I care'. I rejoiced at these words, for I and my family are very devout Lutherans."
There was, he said, even a religious department at the Berlin Town Hall, headed by a Catholic priest, Father Buchholz, who had been locked up in a concentration camp after July 20. At Lichterfelde, Werner said, he had a garden, and some lovely rose-bushes, and he hoped he could soon retire; but now he felt it his duty to do whatever he could to rehabilitate the German people in the eyes of the world. They had fallen so fearfully low.
There was something pathetic about this old-time conservative German. Pathetic in a
different way was Herr Geschke, a seedy little man with bloodshot eyes, who seemed in miserable health and almost half-demented. This former German communist deputy had
been in a concentration camp for twelve years. He was now head of the Welfare
Department at the Berlin Town Hall and, as he told his story of torture and gas-chambers, he suddenly broke down and wept.
Germans released from concentration camps—even broken reeds like Geschke—played
an importent part during those early weeks in Berlin in selecting personnel for the
Russian-sponsored administration, and in doing "democratic" propaganda and denazification work. Before the constitution of the four parties authorised by the Russian authorities, an organisation called ANTIFA was active in purging the administration and in running the "cultural life" of Berlin—and particularly the Berlin radio.
In a sense, the Russians were building on sand; for soon the greater part of Berlin was going to be taken over by "the others". The Russians were invariably bitter about it, claimed that they were building up a coherent anti-Nazi Germany, but that, in Berlin, at any rate, "all this good work would go to pot". I was to remember some of these arguments when, three years later, they attempted their abortive Berlin Blockade.
This was a different Berlin from what it had been. Subdued, frightened, grateful for small mercies, grateful even for a revival of some of the old Berlin frivolity. In one of the surviving buildings of the Kurfürstendamm there was a cabaret attended by well-dressed Germans with furtive looks, by tarts and Russian officers. The whole show was
unspeakably vulgar. Some dirty little song about sonny asking Grandpa whether he and Grandma had really made love in their time and granddad replying: "Olala", or some such muck. Then a tall boy with a guitar boomed Russian folksongs in broken Russian
and a "Song of Transylvania" with the refrain: "Deine Augen brennen heisser als Paprika" ("Your eyes burn hotter than paprika"), then there was a tap-dancer, a xylophone player, and a Polish or Jewish female who howled Parlez-moi d'amour. There were no anti-Nazi cracks, but the theme-song was a boost for local Berlin patriotism. It was called Berlin kommt wieder, and the slimy audience kept joining in with great gusto.
At the stall they sold copies of this song, and at the buffet some foul ersatz orangeade.
The managers of the cabaret cringed and bowed deeply to the Russian officers.
This was a bit of West Berlin—under the Russians. It almost had a whiff of Isherwood!
*
A few days later, Marshal Zhukov gave his famous press conference on the verandah of his villa overlooking the Wannsee. Vyshinsky was also there. With Zhukov, one felt in the presence of a very great man. Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and now the offensive which had started on the Vistula on January 12, and had ended here, in Berlin—Zhukov's name was inseparable from them all. But his manner was simple, and full of bonhomie.
He spoke of the Battle of Berlin:
This was not like Moscow or Leningrad, or even Stalingrad... During the first years of the war, we often had to fight against fearful odds; nor did our officers and
soldiers have as much experience as they have now. In this Battle of Germany we
had great superiority in men, tanks, aircraft, guns and everything. Three-to-one, sometimes even five-to-one. But the important thing was not to take Berlin— that
was a foregone conclusion—but to take it in the shortest possible time. The
Germans were expecting our blow and we had to think out how to introduce the
important element of surprise.
I attacked along the whole front, and at night. As prisoners later told us, the great artillery barrage at night was what they had least expected. They had expected night attacks, but not a general attack at night. After the artillery barrage, our tanks went into action. We had used 22,000 guns and mortars along the Oder, and 4,000 tanks
were now thrown in. We also used 4,000 to 5,000 planes. During the first day alone there were 15,000 sorties.
The great offensive was launched at 4 a.m. on April 16, and we devised some novel features: to help the tanks to find their way, we used searchlights, 200 of them.
These powerful searchlights not only helped the tanks, but also blinded the enemy, who could not aim properly at our tanks.
Very soon we broke through the German defences on the Oder along a wide front.
Realising this, the German high command threw what reserves it had outside Berlin into the fray, and even some reserves from inside Berlin. But it was no good. These reserves were smashed from the air or by our tanks, and when our troops broke into Berlin, the city was largely denuded of troops. Most of Berlin's antiaircraft guns had been thrown into the Oder Battle, and the city was defenceless against air attack.
More than half-a-million German soldiers took part in the Berlin operation. 300,000
were taken prisoner even before the capitulation, 150,000 were killed; the rest fled.
And he concluded this brief story in characteristically professional fashion:
It was an interesting and instructive battle, especially as regards tempos and the technique of night-fighting on such a scale.
[He said he had had to stay awake for six nights running. He and his officers had only been able to do this by sipping cognac. Vodka, though a good stimulant for the troops, was no good for generals as after a time it had a soporific effect.]
The main point is that the Germans were smashed on the Oder, and in Berlin itself it was, in fact, just one immense mopping-up operation. It was very, very different from the Battle of Moscow.
[More recent Soviet accounts of the Berlin Operation, notably in vol. V of the official Soviet history of the war (IVOVSS, V, pp. 288-90) published in 1963 show that it was a much more complex affair than Zhukov suggested. In this battle three-and-a-half million people were involved on the two sides, 50,000 guns and mortars, 8,000 tanks and mobile guns, and over 9,000 planes. In this Berlin operation, the Russians smashed seventy
German infantry divisions, twelve armoured and eleven motor
ised divisions. Before the actual capitulation of the Germans on May 8, the Russians captured 480,000 prisoners, besides 1,500 tanks, over 4,000 planes and 10,000 guns. The History stresses that the Berlin Operation was carried out not only by the 1st Belorussian Front under Zhukov, but also by two other Fronts, the 1st Ukrainian and the 2nd Belorussian. The Red Army,
according to the History, had "crushing superiority" in this operation. It also says that the German soldiers and officers, blinded by Nazi propaganda, went on fighting fanatically till the very end and that, between April 16 and May 8, they inflicted very serious losses on the Russians. The three fronts directly concerned with the Berlin operation lost
305,000 men in dead, wounded and missing— chiefly during the breakthrough on the
Oder and Neisse and during the fighting inside Berlin. They lost over 2,000 tanks and mobile guns, 1,200 guns, 527 planes. "The Anglo-American casualties during the whole of 1945 were 260,000 men." Several hundred, if not thousand, Russians were killed in the storming of the Reichstag alone. So the fighting inside Berlin was much more serious than merely "a vast mopping-up operation", as Zhukov called it. It seems apparent from the discrepancies between some of the above figures and those quoted by Zhukov that he spoke chiefly of his 1st Belorussian Front, rather than of the more "general" Berlin operation. The rivalry between him and other top generals may have had something to do with it.]
Somebody asked what the Russians' relations with the Germans would be. That, he said, depended on how the Germans behaved; the sooner they drew the necessary conclusions
from what had happened, the better. He (Zhukov) was certainly in favour of a quick trial of the German war criminals. He thought there was agreement on that point among all the Allies. "And on other points?" somebody asked. "On other points," he said, "there's also got to be agreement if we don't want to play into the hands of the Germans."
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