The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  Churchill addresses the clamor in the British papers for Montgomery’s ascension to Ground Forces Commander, and the criticisms of Eisenhower and the U.S. generals. The Americans are true freedom fighters, they are on foreign soil for the second time in this century doing combat with tyranny in Europe. The British must celebrate them even as we bleed and weep beside them. England is indebted to America to the greatest depths of honor and humility.

  In a direct slap at Montgomery and his supporters, speaking to the ears of the frontline Yank troops, plus the President and his generals, Churchill advises the British people not to “lend themselves to the shouting of mischief makers.”

  Churchill pauses. The chamber is grave, jolted, he’s struck his targets. Monty, the English press, the grousing Opposition. Certainly the Americans heard this. England has apologized.

  So be it; it was called for. But we are still proud, and that too is called for.

  Enough pie, he thinks. Let’s have us some meat.

  “Unconditional surrender,” he bellows. “Some have said this is too severe a penalty to inflict on Germany. Some have said that unconditional surrender makes the enemy fight harder, to avoid this stain of total defeat. That is because the German people know they have filled the ledgers of inhuman horror and indignity during this conflict. They know they will be handed the bill when this is over and it will be a mighty, mighty charge. But I say our foes need not fear that Britain in victory will mimic their brutality in war. I say to our foes that you know full well how strict are the moral limits within which our action is confined. We are no extirpators of nations, or butchers of peoples. We make no bargain with you. We accord you nothing as right. Abandon your resistance unconditionally.”

  Churchill removes his glasses. He lays them beside the folder. He senses the current he has shot into the risers of the House. Old men like him, and young, feisty bounders and lords alike, Irish, Scot, Welsh, all under one flag and destiny, all under his voice and gaze. Every shoulder is back, every head held high, they are like flowers to the sun after so many days of cloud.

  “Britain,” he calls out, and nods in every direction.

  Then, like an orangutan, Churchill strikes his own breast.

  “We will remain bound by our customs.”

  Again he rocks his fist against himself. He draws out the last words of his message.

  “And our nature.”

  Britain will behave with dignity. Even to defeated tyrants. Even to our Allies when we disagree. Or we are not a Britain worth defending.

  Churchill takes up his glasses and the folder. He turns and walks from the hall under a hail of applause and shouts of ’Oyez!”

  The exhilaration of his oration fades once he has trod off the Parliament floor and into the private hall. None of his Cabinet ministers have followed; they’ve stayed behind to lead the cheers. He is alone with the cost of the exertion, blank and sweaty. He wants only to eat something, wash away this day with a tumbler or two of spirits, and get into his bath with a cigar.

  He wishes he could go to his home at Chartwell in Kent for the weekend. Walk with his geese, paint, lay some bricks. But he has done none of these, his favorite things, since the war began. No time.

  He wants to sleep, for years. Not travel to Malta and Yalta and haggle over the fates of millions with Roosevelt and Stalin.

  He wants England to be not merely safe when the war is done, but strong.

  He steadies himself with a hand against the wall.

  Winston Churchill wants history to fall in line with the way he knows it ought to.

  ~ * ~

  * * *

  January 22, 1945, 11:50 a.m.

  On the Kurfürstendamm

  Berlin

  a young girl seated behind lottie in the dark mozartsaal cinema whispers to her companion, “I’ll kill myself first.”

  Her friend, also a girl, perhaps they are both fourteen, shushes her. But the first one continues. “I will. I won’t let one of those awful Russians touch me. I’ll take poison.”

  The second voice hisses, irritated, she must have been poked by her friend. “Stop it.”

  Lottie whirls around. “Yes. Please stop it, or I’ll call the manager.”

  The two children wilt into their seats. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Lottie returns her eyes to the beginning newsreel. One of the girls giggles and whispers, “Oh, they’ll like her.”

  Lottie grips the arms of her seat to rise and complain if they say one more word, but they do not. She eases her hands and folds them in her lap. There are only a few dozen people in the cinema this morning to see the film version of Carmen. Lottie will move away from the girls if they start up again.

  Rousing military music issues from the screen over the image of a German eagle clutching a swastika and the title of the newsreel: Red Devils Sweep Across Poland!

  A fresh newsreel is released every Saturday for viewing before the main feature. Lottie has watched these propaganda releases change through the war years, from patriotic, happy pictures of soldiers marching through Paris and other cities of Europe to grim battle scenes of enemy dead and wounded. Lately, the reels have become graphic and brutal. Goebbels, the Information Minister, is making certain the citizens of Berlin know what awaits them if the city falls to the Russians.

  On the screen, the camera pans over a primitive steppe village of grass huts and squatting peasants. The announcer proclaims that this is the apex of Russian civilization, they are a subhuman species, the “Asiatic Bolshevik beast.”The grainy black-and-white film next shows a troop of German soldiers running herky-jerky in an attack on a Russian column. Smoke pops from fired guns, geysers of earth erupt, men fall. The camera zooms on writhing faces of wounded German soldiers while the announcer extols their courage in keeping at bay the Russian scourge, which is now halfway across Poland and rushing to the West. Lottie thinks of her long-ago soldier, she imposes his face on the screen, sees it in agony, and closes her eyes just long enough to chase the image away Now the camera dotes on dead enemy soldiers, blood spattered over their faces, eyes wide open in dismal finality, they are filmed in such a way as to look like bodies that never had souls in them. Over the music, the announcer bays that behind the hideous Russian herds there are “Jewish liquidation commandos,” and behind them loom “terror, the ghost of famine, and complete European anarchy.” The film cuts to a smoldering pile of bodies. The choice is clear: defend Berlin to the last breath, with every man, woman, and child, every weapon, shovel, dinner knife and fork. Or fall prey to a terrible fate at the hands of the Communists and the vanishing of everything German forever.

  Lottie has seen frank newsreels before, but never one like this almost extravagantly harsh film. The two girls behind her have vanished; she heard one of them start to sob, and the two bustled away up the aisle.

  The newsreel concludes with a musical flourish and again the eagle and swastika. There follows a moment of blackness while the projectionist switches to Carmen. In the dark and silent theater, Lottie catches herself wringing her hands. She stops and lays them in her lap, fingers curled. In a few seconds the projector in the wall behind her begins to grind, the silver screen shimmers. Lottie looks down to her lap in the strobing dim light. Her hands seem not her own but detached, gray, flickering, deathly claws. They look like the hands of someone who died clutching something, and that something was taken away. She shakes her shoulders to whisk out of her the cold shock of the thought. These are my hands, she thinks, alive and strong. They play the cello, they will not die and grasp at nothing.

  She recalls five minutes before, the scared and mouthy little girls, one who swore to take poison, then left the theater in tears. I will have some protection, Lottie thinks. Somehow. I must.

  Like Furtwängler. The conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. This afternoon will be his final concert until the war is over. He’s relocating to Switzerland for the duration, at the urging of Albert Speer, the Reichsminister for Armaments and Hitler’s chief
architect. Speer is at present the Philharmonic’s most powerful patron. Wilhelm Furtwängler is a conductor of international renown. He has stayed in Germany from the beginning of the hard times, and has opposed the regime in his way, struggling to halt the bans on musicians and music, refusing to allow his orchestra to become a political plaything. Despite his resistance, Furtwängler failed to keep the Nazis’ hands off the BPO, watching the list of verboten music grow every year, beginning in 1935 with Mahler, Milhaud, Stravinsky, and Weill, then expanding to damn Ravel, Debussy, Chopin, Bizet, Tchaikovsky. Wagner has remained the zenith of Nazi musical taste. Wilhelm Furtwängler is protected because of who he is. Fine for him, thinks Lottie. He’s at least waited to the last minute to run away. The rest of us must stay and face the Russians. She wishes she could go to Switzerland too.

  During the movie, Lottie rests her hands in her lap for the coming concert. She wants to play her best today, it may be her last chance to impress the maestro. When Furtwängler returns, she hopes he will suspend the prohibition against women in the orchestra, because she will be too brilliant to replace. Perhaps too—and even more likely—the BPO will all lie dead, she with them, a Wagnerian end. These two futures swing in her mind, a pendulum of fates. Lottie watches the film, trying to concentrate through the ticktocking of anxiety.

  When Carmen is over, Lottie files out of the Mozartsaal. Though the movie palace has been bombed several times, the owners continue to repair it. It’s a marvel they’ve been allowed to do so, in light of Goebbels’ Total War edict of two years ago, after the Russian victory at Stalingrad. Hitler’s little clubfooted Information Minister has done everything he can to spur fear of the Russians, to eke out of Berliners every last desperate bit of production and obedience. In 1943 he shut down every luxury restaurant. The cabarets and theaters were closed in August of last year, but many were already bombed out, the Kadeko, the Scala, the Wintergarden. Were it not for the powerful favor of Albert Speer, Lottie suspects the BPO and Berlin Opera would also have fallen beneath Goebbels’ scythe. All surviving bars and clubs have been shuttered, except for two that are allowed to stay open only to entertain soldiers while in transit through Berlin. Dancing is off-limits. Berlin’s famous prostitutes have been shipped to the Eastern Front to comfort the soldiers. Food rations have been reduced again. The Berlin joke runs that the bombs may end your life, but Goebbels will keep you from living. Lottie is grateful that through some oversight or political connection the Mozartsaal has stayed in operation. It’s one of a diminishing few diversions anywhere in the city.

  The day is a bright one; standing on the sidewalk, Lottie blinks in the confusion of darkness to sudden light. The temporary idyll of the silver screen is wrested from her by stark sunshine on the rubble. Lottie looks around. She wants to go back inside to see another film.

  The time is just before noon. The BPO concert begins at four o’clock. Lottie pushes east on the Ku’damm towards the U-bahn station at the Zoological Gardens.

  On all sides of her is destruction. The Kaiser Wilhelm Church, one of the grandest in all Europe, has been reduced by British bombs to a single stone tower protruding from a gargantuan heap of debris. Buildings everywhere are impossibly cleft; how can they be missing entire walls and still stand, what pride do they have to refuse to fall down? Lottie wants to know, should she need such knowledge herself? Walking, she glances up into the living rooms and bedrooms of flats three and four stories above the street carved down their middle, chairs, brocaded sofas, dressing tables, teetering beds, framed pictures still on nails, a thousand flats exposed like doll-houses held in by magic, invisible walls. Amazingly, people come and go into these rooms. Along the street, scrawled on many walls are messages in chalk: “Beloved Frau Bittner, where are you? We look for you everywhere.” “Everyone in this cellar has been saved.” “My little angel, where are you? I worry greatly. Your Fritz.” Many of the messages have chalk answers scribbled beneath them, whereabouts and aftermaths.

  Berlin, in the way of a great animal, has broad veins running through it. The city’s avenues, even most side streets, are wide enough that they’ve been tough to choke by the collapsed buildings and craters. Here in the west end, where the bombs have been at their worst, bus and auto traffic continues. Swastikas fly from the fenders of most cars; Nazi administrators are the real industry of Berlin.

  Passing among the debris, Lottie halts to watch the foreign workers crawl and stumble in the vast piles. They clean bricks the way Mutti does, stacking them. They push flat-bladed snow shovels and wheelbarrows along the sidewalks to remove hunks of stone and mortar, they sweep like automatons, lift and lower pickaxes to burrow down to broken water mains, they raise clouds of dust with their forced labor. They are guarded by uncomfortable-looking old men who stand with hands on guns. The guards are all in street clothes, wearing black armbands. These are members of the Volkssturm, the Home Guard.

  The alien laborers get the worst of it, thinks Lottie. There are almost a million of them in Berlin, brought in from conquered countries to replace the German men gone to the front. The western European workers, the Dutch, French, Belgians, get better treatment than the rest. They at least get German food ration cards and are allowed into the shelters during raids. But not the eastern prisoners, the Slavs and Poles. They must wear humiliating insignia on their prison garb, the Poles a yellow-and-violet “P” Ukrainians a blue-and-white “Ost.” They’re fed meagerly, and must endure the bombings exposed in their flimsy barracks. The most malicious treatment is reserved for the Russian prisoners of war. These wretches are given the most difficult, filthy, and dangerous toil. All contact between them and German citizens is prohibited. When they die, they’re dumped into unmarked graves. The Nazis make certain that every captured Red soldier is starved and worked to death in the streets and wreckage of Berlin, where all can see. To the Nazi mind, this is good for morale.

  Lottie reaches the U-bahn station and boards a train. The aboveground tracks carry her to Wilmersdorf through a moonscape of desolation. She looks out to the passing tableaus of hungry, degraded men tramping through the alleys guarded by codgers or boys; wounded soldiers in slings, with canes or stumps, swathed heads, patched and empty eye sockets; wandering refugees who have retreated to Berlin from the path of the Russian advance, villagers and city dwellers towing trunks, arms laden with children, telling terrible stories to anyone who will listen and feed them; once-fashionable women now bundled in tattered coats, wearing shoes woven of straw. Through these cold scenes outside the train window Lottie rides to her flat to pick up her cello, don her tuxedo, and perform Mozart and Brahms for an appreciative audience. The seeking, haunted, even missing, eyes of the soldiers and citizens in the streets watch her speed past. They say, The Russians are coming. The city is dying. But Lottie replies from the hurtling train, I play the cello. I must, I will, have protection, somehow.

  At her flat, Lottie changes into her concert uniform and nets her hair. Being the only woman in the BPO, and a temporary one at that, she must dress at home, while the men prepare themselves in their private locker room. Unless there is a performance, she does not put on makeup. It’s viewed as indulgent and unpatriotic. But today she is allowed, and people who see her carrying her big cello case will smile, knowing she’s a musician and special in lipstick and a touch of rouge. She lingers in the mirror, enjoying herself in a tux. The look is vintage Berlin hermaphrodilia, recalling those prewar days of cabarets and sexual libertinism Berliners are renowned for around the world. Lottie knows she would never engage in such permissiveness herself, but she smiles at her image in the mirror nonetheless for she is proud that she is beautiful and that today there is a BPO concert.

  Lugging her cello onto two more trains, by two-thirty she reaches the Admirals Palace near the Friedrichstrasse railway station. On stage, Lottie takes her chair, fourth cello. She settles the instrument against her shoulder and nods around to the men, who acknowledge her arrival. She warms her fingers and her bow hand, she tunes th
e strings, which have gone out from the temperature changes of her travel here. Everyone on stage, one hundred and five of them, does the same in his way with his own instrument. The collective sound is haphazard and disjointed, it is also the welcoming womb of performance to any classical musician. Lottie feels warm and connected. The despair of Berlin outside, the world’s hateful spasm, is chased away by the flying fingers and pursed lips making these awful, wonderful, vintage sounds.

  Dr. Gerhart von Westermann, the orchestra manager, walks on stage. The musicians rest their preparations. Von Westermann steps up on the conductor’s rostrum, he wants to speak. The players seem startled. Lottie has never heard the man say one word, he does his job with brilliance, but in the background of the orchestra.

  Von Westermann welcomes them all and wishes them a fine concert on behalf of Furtwängler’s final appearance. The rotund man clears his throat, then swallows.

  “There is a concern,” he says.