The health and sanitation situation was grave as the country headed into one of the coldest winters in living memory. Diseases such as tuberculosis took virulent root, and there were outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and diphtheria. Rations were insufficient and malnutrition was rife. Basic services such as water and power took time to restore. Law and order and functioning local administration had to be put in place while ensuring neither became refuges for former Nazis. There were millions of displaced people, such as slave laborers and prisoners of war to care for and repatriate, not to mention the dire situation facing most Germans themselves. All this would have challenged any administration. As it was, and despite the genuine efforts of many Allied officials, the occupation was marked by inefficiencies in administration, vagaries among the zones, often strong degrees of callousness, with corruption a worsening element. Black markets were ubiquitous. The cost of occupation was also heavy on the occupiers, particularly for the all-but-bankrupt British, and another imperative in getting Germany back on its economic feet.
Millions of German civilians had fled west to escape the Red Army during the last months of the war. The end of the war saw millions more, overwhelmingly women, children, and the elderly, expelled in horrendous conditions from eastern Germany, from land ceded to Poland, or from eastern European states such as Czechoslovakia. Eastern Germany had been heavily fought over by the retreating Germans, whose scorched-earth tactics and desperate measures had brought misery on their own people, and by the advancing Soviets, who were ill-disposed to show any mercy or forbearance to the civilian populations they encountered. Millions were killed, disappeared, or died of maltreatment, disease, and exhaustion. Women and girls suffered horribly, especially at the hands of men of the Red Army and their allies. Suicide rates soared. Refugees fled as far west as they could, into Berlin or into the British and American zones, adding to the already dire humanitarian situation. But in the war’s aftermath, Germans and their needs were low on the pecking order—of all the Allies—for protection, assistance, and justice.
The behavior of Soviet soldiers could be highly unpredictable, with individuals capable of terrible brutality and callousness, but also of showing great kindness and consideration, especially to children, even if this aspect of their behavior has been somewhat romanticized. The Soviet war memorial in Treptower Park has a monumental statue of a Red Army soldier cradling a child in its arms. The statue was inspired by the actions of Red Army Sergeant Nikolai Masalov, who, during the assault on Berlin, rescued a young German girl while under heavy fire. Accounts abound of the lengths to which Soviet soldiers could be tender with children, even to the extent that Berlin’s women came to know that, if a child was with them, they were all but safe from molestation, and children became almost prized possessions, shared between friends and family.
—
As is so often the case with war and the population displacements that result, the burden of it fell unequally on women and children. Women and girls were the victims of horrendous levels of sustained sexual violence by the conquering powers, but the fate of their menfolk was playing out to its own drama. A huge percentage of Germany’s men had served in the armed forces and were either dead, wounded, missing, or imprisoned. Due to traditional recruitment policies of the German armed forces, many of the survivors of the officer corps were refugees from eastern Germany, from provinces lost to Poland or in the Soviet zone. Worsening matters, in August 1945 the Allied Control Council dissolved and declared illegal all German veterans’ organizations, including the armed forces. Most dramatically, the law banned all organization or association of veterans and revoked all their pensions, benefits, and rights, including from those who had not even fought in the war. At one fell swoop, this rendered all but destitute, millions of men and the families who depended upon them. Veterans were widely distrusted and vilified. However, despite formal injunctions against organizing themselves to claim their rights and honor, they quickly created informal networks and groupings. Von Vollmer’s factory and its attendant association—albeit aided and abetted by Markworth’s plotting—are a fictionalized example of how this could have been done.
The Allies did keep a close watch on veterans, as indeed they did on any group that could, it was felt, harbor Nazi sympathies or provide shelter and succor. One such group that never materialized, despite a high degree of propaganda and hysteria, were the “Werewolves,” which were supposed to have operated clandestinely within occupied Germany to resist the Allies. Another group that never existed was BOALT—the British Occupation Authority Liaison Taskforce—although something like it might have and maybe could have. The British and American armies had many Germans, or men of German ancestry, in their ranks, and many of them came back to Germany with the occupation. Given the real need to feel the pulse of German opinion about the occupation and the occupiers, a unit like BOALT would have found ample employment. The Brandenburgers did exist. An elite unit, similar in training and ethos to Britain’s Commandos or the SAS, the Brandenburgers were proficient in languages, making them a dangerous force and lethal infiltrators.
A last word on the military concerns the vast numbers of prisoners of war captured by the Allies. All four of the Allies used prisoners to some extent as forced labor, for example to bring in the harvest, for rubble clearance, or for postwar reconstruction. Most prisoners were vetted and released relatively quickly after the war ended, the vast majority by 1946, although the Soviets did keep many prisoners into the early 1950s. Given the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front between the competing ideologies, the Soviets implemented indoctrination programs with German prisoners and attempted to recruit some to their cause. These efforts had limited success, although several organizations were formed, such as the League of German Officers. By and large, these organizations had limited impact with most prisoners, who treated them as traitors. Paul Margraff, a German soldier captured at Stalingrad and Berlin’s chief of police after the war, was one such officer, and there were others whom the Soviets placed into positions of authority in, for example, the police force. Margraff unabashedly promulgated pro-Soviet policies, turned a blind eye to Red Army excesses, and ensured Berlin’s police towed the Soviet line.
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With the German armed forces, indeed almost any organization remotely military in nature, rendered illegal, this left the police as the only remnant of the German state capable of exercising control and upholding the law. The police, however, were powerless to prevent crimes committed by the Allies. Furthermore, the police leadership across the country had been replaced with men picked by the Allies for their loyalty. In Berlin, this saw the Soviets replace the entire police force with “anti-Fascist” elements that often behaved as badly as, if not worse than, their Fascist forbears. Police officers were complicit in the harassment of non-Communist politicians and parties, and showed little cooperation with the Western Allies. Police command—the Presidium—was in Mitte in the Soviet Sector. Officers employed in the Presidium were compelled to live in the Soviet sector, and officers in the zones of the Western Allies were obliged to go to Mitte, where, it was suspected, they received instructions on how to behave.
Exasperated by Margraff’s behavior and the general attitude of Berlin’s police, the Western Allies eventually negotiated a thorough reform in October 1946, which, among other measures, decentralized control of Berlin’s police and introduced assistant chiefs of police for the police commanders in the four sectors. These assistants—one of whom was the Bruno Bliemeister who makes a brief appearance in The Divided City—were former policemen who had retired before the Nazis came to power or who had been forcibly removed by them. They were nominated by the Allies to keep an eye on police operations, but they could not overtly interfere in them. Rather, they ensured that inter-Allied policies were implemented and, at least in the three Western zones, diluted Soviet influence over the police as much as possible.
—
In writing this
book, I would like to acknowledge the following works in particular:
Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1955, by Jay Lockenour (University of Nebraska Press, 2001)
Berlin 1945. World War II: Photos of the Aftermath, by Michael Brettin and Peter Kroh (Berlinica Publishing LLC, 2014)
The Long Road Home, by Ben Shephard (Vintage, 2011)
As well, I would like to acknowledge the assistance afforded by the National Archives at Kew, London.
—
As a human, I can only wish that we would treat one another better as a species. As a humanitarian worker, I know this sadly to be untrue, that since the end of World War II, the litany of man’s inhumanity to man has been a long and bloodied one.
The arc of Reinhardt’s story in and around the tumultuous times of World War II, from reawakening in The Man From Berlin to resistance in The Pale House to reconciliation in The Divided City has now come to an end. Although Reinhardt will not march again—his days as a marching man are over—he still has stories to tell, and those stories will be found among the tides of people displaced by the war, and within the international relief operation set up to assist them.
Photo by Barbara McCallin
Luke McCallin is the author of the Gregor Reinhardt novels, including The Pale House and The Man from Berlin. He was born in 1972 in Oxford, grew up around the world, and has worked with the United Nations as a humanitarian relief worker and peacekeeper in the Caucasus, the Sahel, and the Balkans. His experiences have driven his writing, in which he explores what happens to normal people—those stricken by conflict, by disaster—when they are put under abnormal pressures. Visit him online at lukemccallin.com.
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