The House by the Lake

by Thomas Harding

  2 ‘In Groß Glienicke, word filtered through …’ Over the years there had been many notable Jewish residents living in the village. According to research carried out by the Groß Glienicker Kreis, some of the Jewish families who lived part-or full-time in the village included: Dr Adolf Abraham (dentist), Rudi Ball (ice-hockey star), Max and Wally Blaustein (perfume exporters), Rudolf Leszynsky (scholar and insurer), Dr Richard Samson (physician), Josef Schmeidler (merchant and managing director), Robert Salomon Weitz (whose son was John Weitz, the novelist and fashion designer, and whose grandsons, Chris and Paul Weitz, produced the films American Pie and About a Boy, among others), Fritz Wertheim (businessman), and Alfred Wolff-Eisner (doctor and researcher).

  3 ‘a very small number … left the country …’ The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, for example, professed strong anti-fascist views, and fled to the USA in 1940. Ralph Benatzky, Karl Rankl and Robert Stolz had Jewish wives, making their decision to leave German-occupied Austria more straightforward. Others, like Karl Amadeus Hartmann, lived in internal exile during the war, refusing to work with the Nazis or to have their work performed in Nazi-occupied Europe. Then there are the examples of those who joined the Nazi Party but later claimed not to hold Nazi sympathies. Some of these last cases were shunned in the post-war years, such as Max Butting and Eduard Erdmann, while others, such as Will Meisel, were not.

  4 ‘The war was not as far away …’ According to a handwritten note made on the side of his marriage certificate, and archived at the City of Potsdam archive, Robert von Schultz died on 13 September 1941 in Voranova (in what is today Belarus), while serving on the Eastern front. Underneath this note it was added that the death certificate 3/1942 had been ‘sent to a mail address in Rügen on the Baltic Sea’. Yet despite his being the last landlord of the Groß Glienicke Estate, no service or memorial was held at the village church. Another death provoked more of a response. On 14 May 1943, Georg, the Crown Prince of Saxony, drowned while swimming in the Groß Glienicke Lake. The gossip in the Drei Linden was that, because of the prince’s public statements against the Third Reich, the Gestapo was somehow involved in his death.

  5 ‘Indeed, Will was so taken …’ Though the song was registered in 1950 with GEMA, the German copyright music authority, it is probable that it was written much earlier. Meisel spent little time in the village after the war and, given the brutal Russian occupation, it is unlikely that he would have been motivated to write the song after 1945. Additionally, one of the co-writers of the song, Georg Wysocki, left the village in 1948, as reported by his daughter, Gisela Wysocki. According to Sven Meisel the song may well have been written in the 1930s.

  6 ‘On 15 May 1943, the National Theatre Department …’ To see the correspondence regarding Meisel’s military service, see Bundesarchiv Berlin (File: R55/20207).

  7 ‘Hearing of the evacuation order …’ On 6 August, Will Meisel, wrote the following letter to Mayor Buge of Groß Glienicke: ‘Dear Mayor. Because the Gauleiter Goebbels ordered everyone to leave Berlin my family (7 people) is staying during the winter in my house in Groß Glienicke, parcel 3, Weinberg. The house has 6 rooms and under-floor heating. I need 250 Zentner of coal and 100 Zentner of Brikette for the washing house, the bathtub and kitchen, as well as for the pre-heating 1 room-meter of wood. Heil Hitler.’ This letter is held by the Landesarchiv Berlin (File: C rep 031-01-02 Number 1281/2).

  8 ‘Peter, meanwhile, who was now eight years old, attended the local school …’ In a letter to the editor of the village Chronik, Peter wrote that he spent two years in the village primary school of Groß Glienicke. There were forty-eight other students who were taught by one teacher. ‘The education wasn’t very well organised and structured,’ he wrote, but he gained ‘a broad general knowledge’.

  9 ‘Once a week he participated …’ Peter was younger than the typical entry age of ten. He was a member of the most junior Hitler Youth league, known as the Pimpfe, the name for a boy before his voice changes.

  10 ‘On 3 November 1943, the opening night of Königin einer Nacht …’ The Metropol Theater is now the location of the Komische Oper on Behrenstraße in Berlin.

  11 ‘Those on the VIP list …’ The invite list for the Metropol Theater is based on one from 23 August 1938, which was attached to a letter sent by the theatre’s director, Heinz Hentschke, to the Ministry of Propaganda but the list is unlikely to be have been substantially different. The list can be found at the Bundesarchiv Berlin (File: R55/20.204, p. 338).

  12 ‘the reviews were unanimously positive …’ Another critic, Theo Fürstenau, said that whereas a typical show included ‘a little bit of sentimentality, a few jokes, pretty girls that cover only enough of their beauty to be in good taste, and some ingratiating music, [Königin einer Nacht] is freshly polished to shine, and blinds the eyes of the audience’. He went on to say that ‘Will Meisel gave the entire show a light mood with his easy-to-like melodies which … will stick in the mind’.

  13 ‘Eight days later, on 11 November 1943 …’ According to Hanns Hartmann’s Fragebogen, written in August 1945, the Edition Meisel storage facility on Passauerstrasse, Berlin, burned down on 23 November 1943. The family’s home at Wittelsbacherstraße 18 was bombed in February 1944, and it was only then that the Meisels moved permanently to Groß Glienicke. In truth, the family was already spending much of their time by the lake. Hartmann goes on to say that the business returned to Wittelsbacherstrasse 18, Berlin, on 7 June 1945, even though it was yet to be built.

  14 ‘Since its annexation in 1938, Austria …’ Austria was known by the Nazi Party as Ostmark until 1942. Thereafter it was known as Donau und Alpen Reichsgaue. On 10 May 1945, Bad Gastein was liberated by the Americans, a day one of the composers hiding out with the Meisels remembered as follows: ‘War can be totally exaggerated; it is not bad if you stay away from it all in Gastein. Because here with a lot of talent you can lead a civilised and free life, and have a happy end. The bad times are over, never to return, we can breathe out, and we can speak English.’

  Chapter 12

  1 ‘Often seen with a cigar in hand, he walked around the office …’ These details come from a biography of Hanns Hartmann published in Fernsehen Information on 1 November 1960 (nr 31/1960).

  2 ‘a bomb fell on the farm …’ This account comes from Hans Joachim Bartels who still lives on the family farm opposite the church in Groß Glienicke. He was five years old at the time of the explosion and hiding in the barn at the back of the farm with his siblings. His family had lived in the village since 1800, when his great-grandfather had moved there. ‘Everything was in flames,’ he recalled, ‘my parents’ house was totally destroyed.’ Another bomb had fallen in the lake before this; he remembered picking up the glass from his bed afterwards. Later, when the Russians came, he recalled being very scared. They knocked on the family’s door with bayonets, and there were at least ten tanks in the village for two weeks or more. The family moved into the cellar and the Russians took over the main house. They made his mother taste the food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. ‘This worked out well for us, as we had plenty of food,’ he said.

  3 ‘When Burkhard asked his mother …’ This story was recalled by Burkhard Radtke in an interview with the author in August 2014.

  Chapter 13

  1 ‘With the sirens at the Drei Linden going off every few minutes and the sound of artillery …’ Many of the details from this page and the next come from an anonymous letter that was written in April 1945, at the time of the Soviet troops’ arrival in Groß Glienicke. I found a copy of the letter pasted into the village Chronik. Here is an excerpt: ‘We have survived our first attack from low-flying planes. But they are not targeting Glienicke, they are targeting the troops that have gathered nearby. During the day there were more attacks, one after the other, apparently also attacking the airfield, and the roads around the airfield … There have just been several plane attacks one after the other. And you can hear them flying away in the distance. Now hardly any artill
ery, at the moment it is almost silent. You can hear the birds outside. What will the day and night bring?’

  2 ‘Hildegard Munk had also abandoned her house …’ Hildegard Munk’s memories are recorded in an audio interview with her son Klaus and grandson Matthias.

  3 ‘As one of only three airfields in the Berlin vicinity …’ One of those to land at Berlin-Gatow just before the war’s end was Albert Speer, architect and minister of armaments and war production. On 23 April, Speer flew into Gatow from Hamburg, and from there he drove in a black BMW to Berlin, where he would be one of the last to speak to Adolf Hitler in his bunker.

  4 ‘Realising that the Soviets were close …’ The description of Gerda Radtke’s time during the Soviet occupation was provided by her son, Burkhard, who still lives in Groß Glienicke. Of the Soviet occupation, Burkhard said, ‘That’s when the misery started. I thought it could not get worse … but it did.’

  5 ‘Seeing the Soviets, Hanns Hartmann jumped out …’ This story is told by Hildegard Munk. In her recollection, Hildegard suggests that Hartmann was hiding in a hole in the ground – it is likely that she was referring to the pump house that was built into the embankment between the house and the lake. In Hartmann’s handwritten memoir, entitled ‘My Life’s Path’ and dated 9 September 1950, a copy of which is held by the WDR archive, he confirmed that he was living at the house in Groß Glienicke when the Soviets arrived, writing: ‘from 1944 (autumn) increasing difficulties until the marching in of the Russians on 26 April 1945 (Groß Glienicke)’.

  6 ‘Six days after the surrender …’ The exact time of the signing was shortly after midnight in Berlin on 8/9 May 1945. Negotiations on the text had delayed the signing. In the Western countries, 8 May became Victory in Europe Day. In the Soviet Union, Victory Day is celebrated on 9 May, because the surrender had been made at 00.43 hours Moscow time.

  7 ‘Neither Wilhelm Bartels nor the youngsters were seen again …’ Wilhelm Bartels, the thirty-six-year-old who owned the farm opposite the church, had been a member of the Nazi Party, and during the war he had been responsible for an agricultural commission. Upon their arrival in the village, the Russians accused him of organising slave labour from Poland and Ukraine. According to his son, his family was not told of his death until the early 1950s, and even then they were not sure where or how he had died. For the next few decades they desperately tried to find information. The NKVD suggested that he might have been taken to the Soviet camps at Buchenwald and Saschsenhausen, but when they travelled to these sites the family found no new information. It was not until 1996, after the Wall came down, that his family learned through the Red Cross that Wilhelm Bartels had died of a lung infection at a camp near Ketschendorf and that he had been buried in a mass grave next to a wheel factory. In all, over 18,000 German prisoners of war and civilians were deported to Ketschendorf, including 1,600 children between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Over 4,600 people died during the camp’s existence between 1945 and 1947.

  Chapter 14

  1 ‘Two weeks later, on 15 July …’ Harry Truman had replaced Roosevelt following his death on 12 April 1945, and a few days into the conference, Churchill was replaced by Clement Attlee, who took office on 26 July. For a description of the arrival of the dignitaries and the early days of RAF Gatow, see files at the National Archives in Kew (for instance, File: AIR 29/461).

  2 ‘Churchill was shocked by the devastation …’ Over a million Berliners were now homeless. Churchill was ‘much moved’ by the devastation, the people’s haggard looks and threadbare clothes, as recalled by Martin Gilbert in Churchill: A Life.

  3 ‘the Americans dropped a nuclear bomb …’ The number of deaths that can be attributed to these bombs, resulting from long-term radiation effects, are often estimated as 135,000 for Hiroshima and 50,000 for Nagasaki. Some say the figures could be as high as 150,000 and 75,000.

  4 ‘But the British wanted their own airport …’ On 1 August there were five officers and sixty-one other ranks under the command of Captain Smeddle. By the end of that month RAF Gatow was manned by 2,479 personnel, including 697 civilians. At this time the airfield was used by British, French, American and Soviet planes, with around twenty take-offs and landings each day. In the first logbook it was noted that the army’s laundry facility could not cope and that soldiers should make ‘private arrangements’ with the local women. In a meeting held on 22 August, it was agreed that the base would change its name from ‘Staging Post 19’ to ‘RAF Gatow’, and the air officer commanding stated: ‘The AOC did not want any fracas with the Russians but was convinced that the way to prevent both looting and incidents was to show from the outset that we had force, were interested, and were always on the go, and then it would get about that this was a bad place to try any nonsense.’ The food at the camp was not much loved, as evidenced by a poem published in Airline, the base’s magazine, and entitled ‘Airmen’s Mess’: ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday / Breakfast is always the same / Beans beans and more beans / They give us all a pain / Thursday, Friday, Saturday / Breakfast just the same / Yes! Quite right you guessed it / It’s blasted beans again.’ For more on the early days of the British forces in Gatow there are a large number of files at the National Archives in Kew (for instance, Files: AIR 28/296 and AIR 55/52).

  5 ‘The Soviets set up a border control at the Potsdamer Tor …’ The security was lax at these controls until the border was officially closed in 1952. In an interview, Pastor Stintzing recalled football matches being played between the Soviet and East German guards on one side, and British and West Germans on the other, in the woods near the derelict schloss in 1948/1949. There was also an unofficial kiosk at the border providing food and hot drinks to the guards. Whenever senior officers visited the border, the kiosk’s owner would hide until they had gone. Later, this entrepreneur was imprisoned for continuing to run the kiosk.

  6 ‘Then, sometime during the extremely cold winter …’ As a child, Günther Wittich had played with Robert von Schultz’s son Carl Christoph. When he heard the siren on the night of the schloss fire in 1945, he had run to the fire station and returned on the truck, as a member of the brigade. Arriving at the schloss he found a group of Russians blocking their way; they had no guns and did not speak German. He was shocked by their inaction and believes they started the fire on purpose. ‘The villagers gathered around watching the blaze,’ he recalled. ‘They were very sad thinking of old times.’

  Chapter 15

  1 ‘Hanns received a Fragebogen, which he completed …’ This is available at the Landesarchiv Berlin (File: C Rep 120/ 899).

  2 ‘In early autumn of 1946 …’ According to Meisel family legend – as printed in the book 100 Years of Will Meisel – September 1946 was the start of the ‘next phase’ of the publisher’s rebirth, and the third time that Will Meisel would have to build the company from scratch: the first was in the 1920s when he was a young man starting out; the second time was in the 1930s, when the Nazis had forced him to let go of all his Jewish artists and the company had faced collapse; and now again, in the 1940s, following the war and the destruction of the family business by Allied bombs. In fact, Will Meisel did not regain control of his company until 1951.

  3 ‘From Hamburg they travelled to Cologne …’ Later Hartmann would become the first director of the national broadcaster, WDR.

  4 ‘More than 2.1 million cases …’ The slow-down in prosecutions can be seen by comparing the December 1947 figures to those of the following spring. By the end of April 1948, 2,326,257 people had been screened within the British zone (excluding Berlin), of which 358,466 had been removed from office, and 2,456 had been prosecuted for making false statements on their Fragebogen. By April 1948, there were 308 denazification review boards operating within the British zone. During that month, of the 37,797 appeals pending, only 2,428 had been reviewed, of which 2,209 were upheld. See National Archives in Kew (Files: FO1006/126, FO1056/268 and FO1032/1057).

  5 ‘Per capita, these figures …’ The American
s fared equally badly, despite their officious intentions. In March 1946, the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism came into effect, turning over responsibility for denazification to the Germans. To implement this law, 545 civilian tribunals were established under German administration, with a staff of 22,000. Even this was far too small a number to handle the enormous volume of cases. By February 1947, only half of the submitted 11,674,152 Fragebogen in the American zone had been processed, fewer than 168,696 had faced trial, 339 had been classified as Major Offenders, 13,708 as Lesser Offenders, and of these, only 2,018 had custodial sentences.

  6 ‘These remaining cases were to be tried through summary proceedings …’ In 1951, the West German government granted amnesties to lesser offenders and ended the programme. The British denazification files can be found at the National Archives in Kew (Files: FO1012/750 and FO1056/268).

  7 ‘Despite his close association with the Nazi Party, Furtwängler …’ Furtwängler’s tribunal in December 1946 was overseen by some of the same characters active in Meisel’s case: Alex Vogel, Dr Loewe, Dr Flören, Wolfgang Schmidt, Mühlmann, Neumann, Müller-Ness and Rosen. For some reason his panel featured eight people and Meisel’s only six. For a cinematic account of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s denazification trial, see Taking Sides, with Harvey Keitel and Stellan Skarsgård.

  8 ‘Hartmann … would not be appearing as a witness in his trial …’ In an effort to better understand Hanns Hartmann, I spoke to Birgit Bernard, an archivist at WDR. Dr Bernard said that Hartmann was considered by his colleagues to be ‘a very honest man’ who was ‘not interested in people’s past’. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he hired a number of people for the broadcaster who had some previous links with the Nazis. In an email, Petra Witting-Nöthen, another archivist at WDR, wrote the following: ‘The relationship between Hartmann and Meisel it is difficult to say. [Hartmann] knows the Meisel family. He sent Greeting to Will Meisel’s parents. But the relationship was formal, they don’t use the German Du. I think Will Meisel was his chief and the owner of the firm, Hartmann was only the financial director. The letters after the war show a reserved relationship between them.’ It is worth adding that, in his unpublished memoir, Hartmann did not mention the assistance that Meisel claimed to have provided to Hartmann’s wife: helping her flee Germany and obtaining a work permit.