There was simply not enough food – and without a functioning transport system, what little there was couldn’t be moved to the places where it was most needed. Worse, there was a widespread feeling among the occupying armies that the Germans were long overdue a taste of their own medicine: had the Nazi rampage across Europe not deliberately starved villages, cities, entire nations to the point of death?
This, then, was Hitler’s true legacy: a nation starving to death; a population reduced to a desperate struggle for survival, subsisting at best on half the calories needed to sustain life. A country not simply beaten and half-destroyed but wiped completely out of existence.
I was three and a half when peace came. A small, quiet and archetypally blonde German child, I lived in Bandekow, a tiny hamlet in the rural heart of the Mecklenburg region, with my mother, grandmother and younger brother Dietmar. Our home was a big farmhouse, half-timbered and characteristic of the region, set in acres of forest. We were, I think, typical both of a particular class of pre-war Germans and, by contrast, of the post-war country at large. On both sides our family was old, well established and, notwithstanding the wrecked economy, well off.
My mother, Gisela, was the daughter of a shipping line magnate from Hamburg. The Andersens belonged to the old Hanseatic class – the patrician and prestigious ruling elite which had made its money and its name from trade since Hamburg was declared a free city by the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Our house in Bandekow had been in my mother’s family for generations: it belonged to my great uncle, but had almost certainly been used as a country retreat in the years before 1945. Certainly, the Andersens kept their main residence in Hamburg itself and my grandfather remained there, with my grandmother dividing her time between the two homes.
Gisela was one of four Andersen children. Her brother had been killed, serving in the Wehrmacht in the last days of the war; her eldest sister was estranged – the result of some unspoken act of dishonesty that tarnished the otherwise respectable family name – but her remaining sibling, my Aunt Ingrid (known universally as Erika, or ‘Eka’), was a constant companion in my childhood. At the end of the war, Gisela was thirty-one. She was young, bright – in the brittle and privileged way of her class – and pretty. She was also married, though not, as it turned out, happily.
Hermann von Oelhafen was a career soldier. He had served with honour in the First World War: he was seriously injured in 1914, again in 1915, and, after a final wound in 1917, was awarded the Iron Cross for his pains. Like Gisela, he came from an aristocratic background: both his father and mother could boast the tell-tale ‘von’ – the mark of the upper class – in their family names.
But where Gisela was young and lively, Hermann was the complete opposite. He was thirty years older than Gisela and suffered from severe epileptic seizures. Whether these were the cause of his peevish, mean-spirited nature I do not know: what I am certain of is that their marriage – which took place in 1935, during the first confident years of Hitler’s reign – was, by 1945, effectively over. As I grew from a toddler to a young child, I rarely saw my father: we lived in the farmhouse at Bandekow, while Hermann lived 1,000 kilometres away in the Bavarian town of Ansbach.
Perhaps outwardly there was nothing very strange in a married woman living alone with her children and mother. In this our family was typical of the now-dissolved German nation in the immediate months after the war: most adult men – even the very young and the elderly – had been drafted into military service and were now either dead, missing or held in prisoner of war camps across Europe. Germany was a country – more accurately, a former country – of women and children.
But though it played its part, the war was not the prime reason for the separation of my parents. There was an unbridgeable gulf between them; an emotional fracture even less tractable or open to resolution than the divisions imposed upon their nation. I was too young to know it at the time, but it would render my childhood as bleak as the deteriorating political situation in which we found ourselves.
Politics. The second ‘P’ which defined life at the end of the war. Not politics as modern generations have come to know and disregard it; not the jockeying for position and power between rival parties in a settled democracy: politics in 1945 was truly red in tooth and claw.
The last days of the war had seen the Allied forces smashing their way through Germany from all points of the compass. American tanks and troops rolled eastward from France, Belgium and Holland; the British fought their way northwards, up through the country from Italy and Austria; and the vast armies of the Soviet Union raced westwards from what had, before the war, been Poland. For each there was an overriding imperative to conquer and control as much German territory as possible: whatever they held when the war finally ended would, under the Potsdam Agreement, become their property with little prospect of subsequent redistribution. In those last weeks of spring 1945, the borders of post-war Europe were being claimed and, at the same time, the seeds of the Cold War were being planted.
When the fighting was over, it turned out that my father’s home was in the American zone: henceforth his fate would depend on the way Washington saw its duties and rights over the territory it now owned. Bandekow, however, was in the Soviet occupation zone, and Moscow had very different ideas about how to dismantle the infrastructure of Nazi Germany – as well as what it wanted to do with its share of the former Reich.
Initially, at least, there was agreement between the Allies on the need to bring Hitler’s surviving henchmen to justice. A four-power war crimes tribunal was established to put the National Socialist machine on trial; Göring, Jodl, Hess, von Ribbentrop and twenty other leaders of the National Socialist state were locked up in cells beneath the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg to await trial for crimes of war and crimes against humanity. Other than Hitler and Goebbels, the most notable absentee from this roll call of infamy was Himmler, creator of the SS and mastermind of the Nazi’s apparatus of terror: after being captured he had committed suicide before he could be transported to Nuremberg.
The eventual trial and conviction of almost all these men was undoubtedly a triumph for justice, but it also marked the high point of cooperation between the occupying powers. After Nuremberg, America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union would each take a radically different approach to the land and populations they controlled: the individual fates of tens of millions of former Germans depended on which zone they happened to have been in when the war ended. Very soon these great political divides would change the lives of our little family for ever.
The contrast between the four occupying powers was played out first in the way they viewed Nazi Party members. Denazification was a phrase coined in Washington during the last years of war: President Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, recognised that the party’s tendrils had wound themselves throughout every aspect of German life, from the political to the judicial, the public to the personal. In May 1945 there were more than eight million members of the Nazi Party – around 10 per cent of the total population. What was to be done about this entwining of the mechanics of fascism with the warp and weft of everyday life?
The search for an answer was not confined to America, of course. Each Allied power faced the problem of how to pull out the roots of National Socialism while ensuring that its own zone of occupation kept functioning. The first step was to outlaw the party. On 20 September 1945, Control Council Proclamation No. 2 announced that ‘The National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) is completely and finally abolished and declared to be illegal’ throughout the former Reich.
But the party itself was only the most visible of a byzantine tangle of Nazi organisations. Beneath it were more than sixty other official associations, ranging from internationally notorious bodies like the SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth to more obscure societies (even within Germany) such as the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood and the Deutsche Frauenschaft, the National Socialist Women’s Movement. Al
l were duly made illegal: more importantly, previous association with any one of them would be enough to mark someone as a possible Nazi sympathiser.
Neither Hermann nor Gisela were – to the best of my knowledge – Nazi Party members. I never heard them express fascist opinions or support for Hitler. But their personal histories (my father as a career soldier, who had been a desk officer in the Wehrmacht for much of the war; my mother as a former member of Deutsche Frauenschaft) must have led to some investigation by the denazification officials of their respective Occupation Zones.
The Americans were initially fiercely committed to denazification, but quickly became the most pragmatic of the occupying armies. Washington’s military government realised that, however desirable, widespread purges of suspected Nazis would mean that the entire responsibility for organising day-to-day life fell exclusively on its shoulders – a burden that, for a war-weary nation anxious to bring its troops home, was simply too onerous.
And so while my father, like every adult living in the American zone, was required to fill out a questionnaire (termed variously a Fragebogen or a Meldebogen) in which he affirmed that he had never been a member of any Nazi organisation, there was little follow-up or detailed examination of these self-declarations. With little or no oversight, most applicants were issued with official documents pronouncing them to be ‘good Germans’, free of the stain of fascism. They quickly became known as Persilschein – pieces of paper that were able to wash the past as clean as any soap powder.
The Soviet approach was very different. Perhaps because it had suffered greater losses and devastation than any of the four Allied powers – or, more likely, because Stalin had clear plans for the future of the Soviet zone – Moscow adopted a much less relaxed approach.
The Soviet Military Administration in Germany – known by its acronym, SMAD – controlled a vast swathe of territory from the Oder river in the east to the Elbe in the west. On April 18, 1945, Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s much-feared head of secret police, issued order Number 00315: it mandated the immediate internment of active Nazis and senior members of Party organisations. No investigations were required prior to these arrests. Ultimately, 123,000 Germans were rounded up and incarcerated in ten special camps set up across the Soviet zone.
The existence of these prisons – run by the NKVD, Stalin’s equivalent of the Gestapo, and frequently on the site of former Nazi concentration camps – was in itself a secret. No contact was allowed between prisoners and the outside world, but inevitably word did leak out: the often random nature of arrests and internment (by February 1946, genuine Nazi Party members formed less than half of the total number of prisoners), and fear of being dragged off to the network of Schweigelager (literally, ‘Silence Camps’) weighed heavily on an already fearful German population under Soviet military rule.
Almost anything – anonymous denunciation, previous membership of an obscure Nazi society or contact with anyone in the other three Occupation Zones – was enough to earn a knock on the door and transport to a Schweigelager. All too often this proved to be a one-way ticket: almost 43,000 men and women would die behind the barbed wire of these post-war concentration camps.
Did my mother worry about the risk that her involvement with Deutsche Frauenschaft posed to our household in Bandekow? I do not know: the von Oelhafens were a close-lipped family, rarely given to discussion of emotions, much less those of the past. It would be many years before I discovered the secret at the heart of my childhood, a secret that tied Gisela, Hermann and me to a sinister Nazi organisation, one which would certainly have spelled trouble for us if SMAD came to hear of it.
Was this an added worry, clouding my mother’s mind? Again, I do not know. What I do know is that as summer turned to winter, Gisela was terrified of something else: rape.
Throughout 1945, as the Soviet Army fought its way into Germany, its troops mastered one phrase above all: Komm, Frau. It was an order that brooked no disobedience and led to the same inevitable conclusion. Tens of thousands – perhaps ten times that number – of German women paid, with their bodies, the price for Hitler’s brutal treatment of Russian cities and populations. Rape was so commonplace in the Soviet sector that the question for many women, of all ages, was not whether they had been violated but how many times.
It was also quasi-officially sanctioned. Although SMAD commanders in some parts of the Occupied Zone paid lip service to stamping out the violation of German women, in reality others paid a heavy price for doing so. One young Red Army captain, Lev Kopelev, intervened to stop the gang rape of a group of girls and was sentenced for his troubles to ten years in a labour camp: a tribunal convicted him of the crime of ‘bourgeois humanism’.
It was, of course, true that neither the internment camps nor rape were confined to the Soviet sector. The Americans imprisoned thousands of suspected Nazis, often in appalling conditions for years, and French troops frequently ravaged German women in cities under their control. But in the final months of the war, Hitler and Goebbels had fanned the flames of national fear by issuing a constant stream of propaganda about the brutality of the Red Army – and from the moment they fought their way onto German soil, the Soviet occupiers fulfilled the worst of these predictions.
Our family was as vulnerable as any, if not more so. My mother and my Aunt Eka were young and pretty and we came from the hated bourgeoisie: our home was large, comfortable and well-stocked with food from the farm, but it was also isolated, and my brother was the only man in the household. The fear of rape hung over us as the winter wore on. My mother would later remember – one of only a sparse handful of personal feelings she ever shared with me – hiding under the bed whenever she heard rumours that Red Army soldiers were in the area.
But however debilitating the fear, in truth we were better off than most of the population in the Soviet Zone. We had a roof over our heads, unlike the vast majority of people in the bombed-out cities. The winter of 1946–7 was one of the harshest in living memory: temperatures plummeted to -30° and for the millions struggling to exist in the bombed-out basements of their former homes there was no protection from the biting cold. And since what remained of the rail network after the final, disastrous months of fighting was rapidly dismantled by the Soviet Army and taken back east as war reparation, there was little coal to be had: thousands of people simply froze to death.
But it was food – or rather, the lack of it – that soon became the overriding preoccupation. German ration cards were no longer valid: whatever limited provisions had previously been available were now being claimed by SMAD to feed the Red Army. In cities across the country, hunger joined fear as the measure of existence.
In the areas under Moscow’s control, new rationing measures were introduced. The Russians created a new five-tier system: the highest level was reserved, bizarrely, for intellectuals and artists; the next level down was assigned to the women – Trümmerfrauen, as they were called – who worked in chain gangs, tearing down and clearing semi-derelict buildings, often with nothing more than their bare hands. This was much more valuable than the official wages of 12 Reichsmarks they received for cleaning up every thousand bricks. Hard physical labour was the only way to survive and, in the ruins of the nation, Germany’s women dug for the salvation of their families.
The levels of rationing below this fell incrementally and dramatically. The lowest card, nicknamed the Friedhofskarte (literally meaning ‘cemetery ticket’), was issued to those who performed no useful function in the eyes of our Soviet masters: housewives who did no work and the elderly.
Two new words joined the lexicon of post-war lives that winter. The first was Fringsen: it emerged after the Catholic cardinal of Cologne, Josef Frings, gave formal blessing to what many of his flock were already doing – stealing in order to survive. Crime rose dramatically: in addition to the uncountable tally of thefts and rapes by Red Army soldiers, Germans under Soviet occupation began preying on each other. Berlin alone averaged 240 robberies and five murders e
very day. Urban crime may not have been a pressing concern for the von Oelhafens, living in the relative security of rural Mecklenburg, but the second new word had a very real meaning. Hamstern meant, quite literally, ‘to hamster’: in practice, it was a constant procession of city dwellers to and from the countryside, desperate to trade their few remaining possessions for the food we had in relative abundance.
This was the reality of Stunde Null: an existence defined by three constant companions: fear – especially of the Red Army and of its determination to exact revenge on German civilians for Hitler’s war – hunger and cold. This was Germany, my country and my life on my fourth birthday. This was the legacy of the glorious Reich. And there was worse in store. Throughout 1946, as relations between the occupying powers worsened, Moscow’s intentions towards those under its rule in SMAD grew starker. As well as stripping the zone of wealth and food, it began the process of removing the one, flickering hope we had enjoyed when the war ended: freedom.
The boundaries between the four zones were becoming ever less passable. An ‘Inner German Border’, as SMAD termed it, had been established around the Soviet-held territory in July 1945, but since then it had been only sporadically policed. Although anyone wanting to move between the Soviet sector and the other Allied Occupation Zones officially needed an Interzonenpass, at least one and a half million Germans had managed to flee into the American or British zones. Now that began to change.
In the summer of 1947, preparations were underway for the eventual transformation of SMAD into the new communist-ruled German Democratic Republic. New contingents of Soviet soldiers were assigned to the official border checkpoints. Unofficial crossing places would soon be blocked by newly dug ditches and barbed wire barricades. The Cold War was beginning and we were living on the wrong side of the coming Iron Curtain. In the summer of 1947 my parents – separated both physically and emotionally – made a remarkable joint decision. It was time to escape.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 2
