The House by the Lake

by Thomas Harding

1944

  Hanns Hartmann

  HANNS HARTMANN HAD first met Ottilie Schwartzkopf in 1922. At the time, he was twenty-one years old and she was thirty-seven. They had bumped into each other at the opera house of Essen, a city in western Germany, when Hanns was training to be an actor and she was performing under the name ‘Ottilie Schott’. Born into a Jewish family in Prague, Ottilie had moved to Germany years before, hoping to build her career. Within a short time, Hanns and Ottilie were going out, unworried about people’s mutterings about the age difference.

  It wasn’t long before Hanns decided he was more interested in management than acting and, in 1925, he secured a job running a theatre in Hagen, a city located fifty kilometres to the west of Essen. He was, at that time, the youngest theatre director in Germany. His next break came three years later, when he was appointed theatrical director for Chemnitz, a city in the far east of the country. He was now responsible for three venues including a theatre with 500 seats, an operetta hall with 800 seats and an opera house with 1,250 seats. With overall artistic and financial control, he oversaw hundreds of singers, actors, conductors, musicians, choreographers and set builders. He became known as a man who made fast decisions and was capable of both artistic originality and financial prudence. Meanwhile, Ottilie’s career as an opera singer continued to flourish, and she appeared in performances across the country. In 1927, after five years of courtship, she and Hanns were married.

  Then, in late February 1933, just a few weeks after the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship, Hanns was told that he must choose between his wife and his job. Unable to imagine a life without Ottilie, Hanns made his decision and, on 9 March, was suspended. Then, on 7 April, following the enactment of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, and because of her Jewish heritage, Ottilie was banned from any public performances. Finally, on 30 June, still refusing to leave his wife, Hanns was permanently dismissed from his job.

  Realising that he needed to find employment quickly, Hanns successfully applied for a position as director of another theatre company. He soon lost this job as well when the local Nazi Party banned him from the entering the building. Now desperate, Hanns worked as a secretary for a wealthy Czech businessman. A year later, he began approaching music publishers and composers, hoping to secure a job in the arts, one that he could perform under the authorities’ radar. This was when he met with Will Meisel, and, in 1935, was taken on as the creative director.

  Hanns flourished at Edition Meisel, quickly developing a reputation as a man who knew his own mind. He did not like to be dependent on anyone and could work the system. He was not prone to illogical thinking and was quick to dismiss a foolish idea – even if it came from Will Meisel. Often seen with a cigar in hand, he walked around the office1, keeping an eye on even the smallest detail, taking down notes and calculations on a pad he kept in his pocket. Before long, and despite the difficult political situation, the business was benefiting from his savvy financial management.

  Then, on 1 January 1937, Hanns Hartmann was excluded from the Reich Chamber of Culture, whose membership was a prerequisite for working in the professional arts. This was the last straw. A few days later, Hanns and Ottilie agreed it was time to leave the country. Contacting the Czech businessman, with whom he had previously worked, he negotiated a contract to manage one of his businesses in Switzerland. He would be paid 4,000 marks each month and gain Swiss citizenship. Two weeks before their departure the Czech businessman died from a sudden embolism. The deal was off. The Hartmanns would have to remain in Berlin.

  Since the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Jews had been banned from marrying non-Jews. Yet an exception had been made for the approximately 20,000 couples – such as the Hartmanns – who had wed before the law’s enactment. Regarding this group, the Nazis announced a series of increasingly complicated rules, depending on ancestry, gender and religious practice. As far as the Hartmanns were concerned, because Hanns was deemed an Aryan and head of the household, and because the couple did not attend synagogue, even though Ottilie was Jewish, they were considered ‘privileged’. By contrast, those belonging to non-privileged mixed marriages were forced out of their homes and into cramped Jewish-only buildings, and had to wear a yellow star or J on their clothes.

  In practice, such rules were interpreted differently depending on the local authority and the connections at the disposal of the couple. Nazi bureaucrats frequently punished even those declared ‘privileged’, dismissing them from employment or banning them from public organisations. Other tactics included harassment and being pulled in for questioning by the police or, worse, by the Gestapo.

  Stuck in Berlin and faced with the rapidly escalating anti-Semitism gripping the capital, Hanns asked his boss for help. Through his lawyer, Reinhold Walch, Will Meisel then contacted Hans Hinkel, the head of the Reich Chamber of Culture. A short while later, Will Meisel told Hanns Hartmann that he had obtained a ‘special permit’, permitting the Hartmanns to remain in Berlin without harassment or fear of deportation.

  Hanns had spent the start of the war assisting Will in the running of his publishing company. Much of his time was spent travelling around Germany by train, promoting the company’s music to radio stations and theatre directors. When the business was moved to Groß Glienicke, Hanns drove back and forth from his apartment in western Berlin to the lake house. In 1943, Hanns was called to active duty, only to be let go seventeen days later, once his superiors discovered that his wife was Jewish. It was after this and other ‘increasing difficulties’, as he later noted in a four-page handwritten memoir – presumably alluding to both the increased Allied aerial bombardment and the dangers that his Jewish wife faced from the Gestapo – that he and Ottilie moved to Gloß Glienicke in the autumn of 1944, seeking calm and sanctuary.

  The Hartmanns were not the only family who saw the village as a place of safety. According to local rumours, the director of one of Germany’s largest record companies had moved into a house further down the shore. Apparently, having divorced his Jewish wife, he had remarried and relocated, hoping that his sons’ Jewish parentage would not be discovered. The villagers chose not to denounce these runaways; perhaps they liked the idea that Groß Glienicke had become a safe haven. Or perhaps they thought it was none of their business.

  There were others too, mostly professional families from Berlin with weekend houses near the lake, who now chose to live full-time in Groß Glienicke, hoping to avoid the worst of the aerial bombardments. Among this number was Hildegard Munk, the wife of Fritz Munk, whose weekend home stood next to the lake house. While her husband remained in the city, tending to the growing number of civilian casualties that were brought to his hospital, Hildegard stayed in the country, praying that her two soldier sons were safe, and that the war would soon end.

  But if any of these refugees thought they could completely avoid the threat from the skies, they were wrong. It was around this time that a bomb fell on the farm owned by Wilhelm Bartels2, located directly opposite the village church. Targeting the Gatow airfield, the bomb had dropped short, entirely destroying the stone and mortar farmhouse that had stood for hundreds of years. The air-raid siren had given the family good warning, yet there was one death, a Polish forced labourer. He had been unable to hide with the others because the Nazis had prohibited Poles and other Eastern European workers from entering air-raid shelters.

  There were other bombs that came close to the village over the next months, falling either in the lake or outside the village. The residents were thankful that the most important buildings had so far survived the war, particularly their beloved church, the Potsdamer Tor and the schloss. The escalating aerial campaign did, however, cause disruptions to the electricity and water supplies. There were long periods when running water was no longer available and, despite knowing that this was where many of the local houses dumped their sewage, many settlers, the Hartmanns included, were forced to take their drinking water from the lake. />
  In the first few months at the house, the Hartmanns were able to purchase goods from the village shops – Frau Mond’s grocery opposite the Drei Linden, Herr Reinmann’s butcher’s round the corner and Dettmer’s bakery on Sacrower Allee. For a while, luxury items were available, such as coffee, meat, fruit and butter. These they purchased using money Hartmann had saved while working for Will Meisel. Aware that supplies might run out, the Hartmanns had stocked up, storing the items in the lake house cellar. When funds ran out, they bartered items of value left at the house, a few old pots, a coffee-maker, the bread machine.

  On one occasion, Gerda Radtke sent six-year-old Burkhard to warn the Hartmanns that they should quickly find shelter. She knew that sometimes, depending on the wind direction, her neighbours failed to hear the air-raid siren that sounded at the Drei Linden. Burkhard later recalled running to the lake house and knocking on the front door with the diamond-shaped window. When nobody came, he knocked again, louder this time. Eventually the door opened a few inches and he saw the face of Frau Hartmann. She looked undernourished, pale and scared. Having relayed the news about the air-raid warning, Burkhard ran back to the safety of his own house. A few seconds later, the Hartmanns hurried outside to hide in the concrete pump house at the bottom of the garden. When Burkhard asked his mother why the Hartmanns could not join them in their wine cellar3, which was dug deep into the ground, his mother explained: ‘Because they are Jewish.’

  The winter of 1944 descended on Groß Glienicke with the aerial assault on Berlin intensifying each day and the Soviet forces moving through Poland, advancing ever closer. It was a particularly cold November and December, the temperature remaining well below freezing. The house was not designed to be inhabited during such severe weather. Bundled up in multiple layers of clothing and blankets, the Hartmanns sat in front of the living-room fire, grateful for the wood they had gathered during the autumn. But feeding themselves was becoming increasingly difficult. While others in the village had animals on which they could survive – chickens, pigs, goats, cattle – the Hartmanns had no such supplies. Similarly, the vegetable garden that had been so well tended by Alfred Alexander, and which could have provided much needed provisions, had been neglected, and lay overgrown with weeds.

  Around this time, Hanns contracted shigellosis, a severe form of dysentery caused by drinking polluted water, and suffered from chronic diarrhoea, stomach cramps and fever. With only his wife to care for him – there were no doctors then working in the village or nearby – Hanns lay in bed hoping that his symptoms would soon improve.

  Their predicament worsened in January 1945, when the new year ushered in a massive storm. Thick white flakes fell for days, blanketing the garden with snow two metres high. It was exhausting to trek into the village. Even then, the cupboards of the few shops that were still open were nearly bare, following five years of war. With their supply of food almost depleted, Hanns and Ottilie stayed inside, listening to the radio, praying that the fighting would soon be over.

  13

  HARTMANN

  1945

  AT THE BEGINNING of April 1945, over two million Soviet soldiers converged on Berlin from the east, bringing with them 6,000 tanks and 40,000 pieces of artillery. Their plan was to encircle the city, sending part of the Red Army to the north, and part to the south, with the forces converging to the west of the capital near Potsdam. For Hitler, holed up in his bunker in the city centre, it soon became apparent that fighting on would be in vain. With each passing day, the war was reaching a bloody crescendo.

  Yet even at this late stage of the war, the villagers of Groß Glienicke were able to place telephone calls to friends and family in Berlin. In these conversations, as much as on the street or in the air-raid bunker, rumours were swapped, discussed and embellished. Those with radios could pick up BBC Radio transmissions from which they learned that American and British forces were fast approaching Berlin from the west through the cities of Cologne, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. In Groß Glienicke, there grew a sense of ensnarement.

  In previous weeks, the Hartmanns had witnessed wave upon wave of planes flying in from the west, over the village, across the lake and on towards Berlin. There were times in which the entire sky seemed to be filled with aircraft. The rumble of thousands of tons of explosives pummelling the city could be clearly heard, and for days and nights the firmament flared bright, as the capital’s buildings burned on an industrial scale.

  With the sirens at the Drei Linden going off every few minutes and the sound of artillery close by1, the Hartmanns found it hard to sleep. At first, on hearing the approaching planes, they would duck instinctively. Before long, they became used to the noise: the scream of the engines, the barking of the guns, the booming of the explosions. If the windowpanes rattled and curtains and pictures fell down, that meant a bomb had fallen nearby. Sometimes the shells exploded so loudly they thought they had been hit.

  Then, on Sunday 22 April, the sirens suddenly fell silent. Rumours circulated around the village that a ceasefire had been agreed. Others said that the Allies had stopped their overhead bombing to allow American tanks to approach Berlin. The next day Soviet fighter jets buzzed the village. This was the first time that the Hartmanns had seen low-flying planes. They did not strafe the village, instead focusing their firepower on the German troops who had gathered at the airfield. During the day there were more attacks, one after the other, on the Gatow airfield and the roads around.

  With the prospect of a ground assault fast approaching, Hanns and Ottilie decided to hide in the pump house: a concrete bunker measuring four metres square buried into the slope running down to the lake. For the next few days they hid in the bunker, with only one water bottle and little food. It was cramped, dark and terribly cold, but they felt more protected than if they had stayed at the house, which was more likely to be attacked come the invasion.

  They were not the only people to seek shelter away from their homes. With her husband still in Berlin working at his hospital, Hildegard Munk had also abandoned her house and moved into her neighbour’s pump house2. Joining her were five others: her neighbour, Ewald Kunow – the pharmacist – along with three girls from the village, one of whom had a baby. Like the Hartmanns, their thinking was that if the Soviets did come, they would probably want to requisition the houses; plus that concrete offered more protection than the wooden walls of the summer houses.

  On 26 April, the sun rose over the lake, casting a red glow across its calm waters. For a while, shooting could only be heard in the distance, but then grew closer, louder and more frequent. Judging by the sounds, the most dramatic fighting was taking place just outside the village. The Soviets were attempting to take the Gatow airfield to the east of the village and the 67th Tank Regiment’s base to the north. As one of only three airfields in the Berlin vicinity3, Gatow had been operational until just days before, with thousands of German troops flying in, on their way to defend the capital. Now, the only planes flying were Soviet. The tank base, in contrast, was deserted, all of its vehicles, troops and supplies having been relocated to the east in an effort to halt the Soviet advance. By lunchtime the gunfire had stopped. It seemed that the Soviet troops had captured both of their targets.

  It was now that three fleeing German soldiers knocked on the door of Gerda Radtke, the mother of the three boys who had befriended the Meisel sons and who lived just behind the lake house. Realising that the Soviets were close4, and with her husband still away on service with the German Army, she suggested that the soldiers escape across the lake. Together, they dragged the Meisels’ old red canoe out of the garage, and Gerda pointed them across the waters to the far shore, from where they might flee to Berlin.

  A few hours later, the first Soviet troops arrived in Groß Glienicke. By now, there were only a handful of German soldiers left to defend the village. Two had carried a machine gun up the tight, winding stairs of the church steeple, in order to mount a defence from a high position. From their pump house, the Hartmann
s could hear the rat-tat-tat as the Germans tried to hold off the Soviets. Brave as the attempt may have been, the result proved disastrous for both men and tower, as they were promptly blown up by the Soviet troops.

  The fighting continued in the streets. At around four in the afternoon, three Soviet soldiers broke through the fence between the Munk and Kunow properties. Spotting a few German soldiers in the lake house garden, they started shooting. Some of the ammunition struck the Munks’ house, leaving holes in the wall of one of the children’s rooms. When one German soldier was shot, the others fled. Seeing the Soviets, Hanns Hartmann jumped out of the pump house5, put his hands in the air and yelled, ‘Ich Bolshevik! Ich Bolshevik!’ – ‘I am a Bolshevik’.

  Uninterested in Hanns, or his claims of solidarity, the soldiers pushed on up the shore. With the Soviets now gone, Hildegard stepped out of the Kunow pump house and covered the dead German soldier with branches and leaves.

  Now that the German resistance was quashed, the Soviets arrived en masse. To the villagers’ surprise, they drove neither tanks nor trucks, but instead straggled in as a ragged column of men on foot. Exhausted and malnourished, they seemed desperate for an end to the war. Their only vehicles were Panjewagen, four-wheeled carts pulled by horses, now loaded with items looted over the previous days.

  That night, the Soviets returned to the lake house and the other homes along the shore. There they dug holes in the sandy gardens, covering themselves in blankets and quilts stolen from the houses. The following day, worn out by the fighting, the Soviets slept late. When they awoke, they began exploring the village. Hildegard hoped they would be safe in the concrete pump house. ‘We were at their mercy,’ she later recalled.

  Her fears were realised when they heard the sound of a rifle butt thudding against their door. ‘Send the women out!’ a voice commanded. Frau Munk was terrified, as were the three young women. Herr Kunow came out, telling the soldiers that Frau Munk was an elderly woman, what could they want with her? The five Soviet soldiers took one look at her, agreed, but then grabbed the younger women, whom they wrestled, kicking and screaming, outside and into the houses nearby – the Kunow, Munk and Meisel homes. There, they were raped.