After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  Howley went back to a Schloss near Halle and sulked. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told his officers, ‘we are never going to Berlin.’89 On 29 June Clay and his British counterpart General Sir Ronald Weeks and the civilian advisers Robert Murphy and Sir William Strang landed in Berlin to discuss arrangements with Marshal Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov. At that meeting the frail land lines were established that were to become the Allied routes to the city until 1989. Howley made another attempt to reach Berlin on 1 July with 85 officers and 136 men. This time he got through - although the Russians made him less than welcome when he started putting up the Stars and Stripes in the American Sector.

  Howley says the Americans celebrated their arrival with a fist-fight with the Russians in a restaurant: a Polish American major apparently floored six of his Russian allies.90 Attitudes were clearly beginning to change: the Germans did not seem such a bad lot after all, and the Russians were not exactly the sort of people you wanted to have as allies. Summing up his initial feelings about them in 1945, Howley was to recall that he had thought of them as ‘big, jolly, balalaika-playing fellows, who drank prodigious quantities of vodka and liked to wrestle in the drawing room’.91

  The British too made a move on 1 July, only to be told that Magdeburg Bridge was closed. They found another bridge and slipped into Berlin, but a full entry was still delayed until the 4th. Officers later recalled the shock of seeing the lakes in the prosperous west filled with the corpses of women who had committed suicide after being raped. It was weeks before the Anglo-Americans achieved a real military presence, even if Ruth Friedrich reported seeing an American in the Schlossstrasse in Steglitz on 3 July.92

  The main force of the Anglo-Americans arrived on Friday 6 July after withdrawing their troops from the disputed parts of Saxony, Thuringia and Mecklenburg - much to the chagrin of their inhabitants. The Control Council had been created in November 1944, and its seat was to be a ‘jointly occupied’ Berlin. As yet no one knew how that was to be managed. Would there be checkpoints between the sectors? Were Berliners to be issued with passports?93 It was agreed that the presidency of the Kommandatura would be rotated. Zhukov allegedly informed the Americans that he would not guarantee food for the Berliners, but visitors to the Allied conferences were well looked after. The Soviet marshal claimed that twice as many officers attended the Russian-hosted meetings because of the quantities of caviar and vodka that were laid out. This feast was apparently known euphemistically as ‘tea’.94

  Howley relates that the Americans were much taken up with the abuse of Berlin women by the Russians, conveniently forgetting the widespread incidence of rape by American soldiers. A Russian general excused his countrymen, admitting that the rapes had done his country’s reputation no good, but it was nothing to what the Germans had done in his country. As the Russians had had Berlin to themselves for two months, they had haunts in the American Sector they were loath to give up. On one of these expeditions a girl was killed by some Russian sailors. The Americans complained, but the Russian commander told them there were no Russian sailors in Berlin: they had to be bad Germans in stolen Russian uniforms. The atmosphere grew tense. The Americans self-righteously decided that they were allowed to shoot to kill when women were involved. Changing their tune, the Russians excused their conduct by suggesting the men had been drunk or that they were deserters. In an exchange of fire in a railway station, some Russians were killed. At this the Russians launched a complaint. They cited a British sergeant who had knocked a Russian’s teeth out and dumped him across the border. That was an appropriate chastisement; it was wrong to shoot. Howley claimed the shooting ceased with the end of Russian rape and looting.95

  In Berlin the Russians received the more populous working-class areas to the east, while the Western Allies carved up the richer districts to the west. There were enclaves and exclaves: the radio station was in the British Sector, but remained in Soviet hands; and the village of Steinstücken was included in Berlin. There were other anomalies that persisted until 1989: the Soviets had to be able to tend their war memorial in the Tiergarten, and each army had the right to monitor the others, which meant issuing passes to one or two privileged intelligence men who had the right to roam in a Western or Eastern sector or zone.

  The Americans proved a disappointment. The Berliners had the feeling that they did not know why they were there. Margret Boveri, who had worked as a journalist in the United States and had been interned there at the beginning of the war, discovered that many of them spoke less English than she did. It was better to speak Spanish. Sometimes a little French helped. Other women were initially relieved that they could sleep in peace - unbothered by Russian interlopers; but, if that was true in the main, there were exceptions on both sides. Margret Boveri recounts the case of an estate-owning family on the edge of Berlin who were out walking when the Russians arrived and so ran back to the house petrified with fear as to what the soldiers would do to their daughters and their friends. They found to their surprise that the Russians had touched nothing and had been exceptionally polite. When the Americans arrived, however, one of the girls was so brutally raped that it took her years to recover from the shock. In general, however, Margret Boveri thought that whatever occupying army controlled your sector was the worst in the eyes of the Berliners. Every inhabitant envied the soldiers of their neighbours. The Americans were particularly naive. Dr Hussels, medical chief for Zehlendorf, was asked to provide 2,500 beds. She asked where they thought she could find them. The officer replied, in the hospitals. She had to inform him that the Russians had already taken them.96

  The chief excitement was what could be gleaned from American dust-bins. Margret Boveri was working for the publishers Ullstein, where she came across a review of an American book that said the average American threw away more than the consumption of a Russian civilian. It was American policy that nothing should be given away and everything should be thrown away. So those German women who worked for the Americans were fantastically well fed, but could take nothing for their families or children. A woman who had put some cheese-parings on a windowsill to take home received a tremendous dressing down, and even the unfinished coffee was poured down the sink at the end of the day. The Americans were outraged that the starving Berliners should dare to help themselves to their food. Colonel Frank Howley had arrived in Berlin with a couple of tame wild boars the army had adopted on their drive east. When a German tried to eat one of the boars he was brutally knocked to the ground. Howley’s fellow officers, however, impressed on him that the boars were more trouble than they were worth, and the Americans ate both.97

  Margret Boveri’s friend Elsbeth together with her sausage-dog Batzi came across a real treasure trove discarded in Grunewald. Bread of a whiteness Berliners had not seen for years, wrappers from butter and margarine packets, firm onions; but the Americans found out that someone had raided their refuse and were more careful after that. There were still finds to be made, however, and Elsbeth managed to live for five days on a rice pudding that she had filched out of an incinerator. That pudding had the makings of an epic. Margret Boveri was still singing its praises days later. Then she also received some chicken bones, and had the pleasure of making a soup with a little more body than the vegetable broth she more habitually used. The supreme delight, however, came when Fräulein Roscies found a half-eaten sponge cake and a dish of a sort of ‘tapioca-white-bread pudding’ that contained half a squeezed lemon: ‘a proper, grown-on-a-tree lemon’. The eating of this plunder runs to a long paragraph in her account.98

  Despite the largesse to be found in rubbish bins, there was still a considerable shortage in the third week of July. So far they had had no meat that month; it was the sixth week without fat and probably the twenty-fifth without milk or eggs. Margret Boveri consoled herself by picking some magnificent flowers and setting them up in her airy if smashed-up room. In 1950, Howley nonetheless claimed that the Americans were spending their time worrying about the subsistence of the Berliners. He critic
ised the Russian rye loaf, which required 100 lb of flour to make 145 lb of bread. It was too wet, he said, and rotted.aw It is somehow unconvincing, in the light of later events at least, when Howley reports a conversation with the French colonel Dalade in which he asks whether food can be political. The Frenchman replies, ‘Of course!’ Howley and the Americans were already fully immersed in the war for hearts and minds, and started teaching Berlin children baseball and basketball.99

  The refusal to look kindly on the starving Berliners was part of the same policy that forbade ‘frat’ or socialising with the enemy. Initially frat was punishable by six months’ imprisonment. Soldiers were forbidden to shake German hands or give presents and were to treat them as a conquered race. Very soon the Americans in particular were out in pursuit of ‘Fräuleins’, and there were a few curiosities to see. The wife of a former foreign minister, Frau Solf, for example, who had been condemned to death by the Nazis for having operated an oppositional salon and spent over a year in Ravensbrück, began to receive visits from the British and the Americans; but, although she was no more than skin and bone, they brought her nothing to eat.100 The Anglo-American policy on frat stood in sharp contrast with the Russian one, whereby contact with the civilian population was informally permitted as a reward for the one and a punishment for the other. Some Berliners believed that the Russian policy was kinder than the ostracism decreed by the Anglo-Americans. Some even went so far as to say that the Berlin women had been relieved by their attentions - they had been so long deprived of their own menfolk.

  Treating the Berliners like a conquered people engendered sympathy for the former Nazis. No distinction was to be made between good Germans and bad Germans, so the good Germans began to muck in with the bad. In some cases only the names had changed. The Blockwart, the resident sneak, of Nazi times had briefly reappeared as the Hausobmann. Margret Boveri’s emerged with the denazification questionnaire, the Fragebogen, in his hand, crippled with anxiety at the thought that the authorities would discover he had been a Pg. Ruth Friedrich was stormed by ex-Nazis asking for testimonials that they had helped Jews.101 When the people had joined the Party as a matter of routine, of officious lip-service, even anti-Nazis were prepared to help them.

  Worse than the ban on frat was the requisitioning of houses in the smarter western suburbs such as Zehlendorf and Dahlem. This was the American Sector, and the area where there were the most comfortable villas. The US authorities even briefly requisitioned the Titania Palast as an officers’ club until Leo Borchard succeeded in getting it back. The Muscovites took over big houses in a largely unscathed Pankow, while the top Soviet brass settled in Karlshorst. In total some 3,000 flats and houses had to be made available. ‘Whether anti-Nazi or pro-Nazi, whether rich or poor, whoever had to get out, had to go,’ wrote Ruth Friedrich.102

  By the autumn of 1945 the Berliner’s living space was reduced to less than ten square metres.103 The French had finally pitched up after they were allotted a morsel of the British Sector in Reinickendorf and Wedding on 23 July, and found themselves a few nice villas in Frohnau, Wittenau and Tegel. The British came out of it the worst, as there were fewer palatial residences in Wilmersdorf or Spandau. Wherever, the grabbing of houses by the Allies led to acute misery on the part of the stricken population. Not even Jews who had returned from the camps were immune and were thrown out at pistol-point. The victims were given a few hours to pack up their things. The result was that they had to find some space in a friend’s flat until that too was grabbed by another officer of the garrison. Meanwhile, women who had once led a privileged life in Germany struggled to find a place as a servant or cleaner to the invaders. One Berliner who had been kicked out of his house commented bitterly that first the women had been raped by the Russians, now they had to wait on the Americans’ whores.104 Despite their superior airs the Americans wanted to be greeted as liberators and resented the fact that they were not. Their cold-blooded approach contrasted strongly with that of the Russians.

  Preaching in Dahlem in July the anti-Nazi theologian Otto Dibelius drew attention to the mortality figures for Berlin. In normal times, the daily rate was around 200; in the war it had risen to nearer 250 as a result of the bombing; now the figure was around 1,000, and this in a far smaller city. The famine was becoming acute. People, chiefly men, were falling like flies. The final killing spree and the high mortality rate after the cessation of hostilities meant that there were lots of dead to bury. There was nowhere to put them and no coffins, and the Allies would not help. Families had interred their loved ones in the ruins or laid them out in mortuary chapels. Berliners resorted to using large wooden cupboards or simply wrapping the body in a horse blanket tied up with cord. Ruth Friedrich records seeing an instance of this: a bundle with a pair of yellow, wooden-seeming feet protruding from the end.105 All over the city there were ad hoc graveyards. In front of the cinema opposite the Woman there was a collection of crosses. The first to be buried there was a girl who had leaped from a third-storey window to avoid being raped. Fresh crosses began to appear soon after.106 Questioned, the Russian general Gorbatov said the famine was the result of the Nazis, who had sabotaged supplies. 107

  The Honeymoon is Over

  At the beginning there was some feeling of community among the victorious Allies. Frank Howley, who liked to think he had understood the Russians’ bad faith from the first, cites his superior officer Clay saying naively, ‘I like Sokolovsky [the Soviet assistant commander], he wouldn’t lie to me.’108 It didn’t take long for the Allies to fall out, not only causing friction between the soldiers, but also creating a danger for Germans who showed too much sympathy for one or other of their conquerors. A German who worked for the Russians was likely to be harried or imprisoned by the Americans. Germans who threw in their lot with the Americans needed to be careful when they entered the Russian Sector.

  A tragedy occurred on 23 August that highlighted the fickle relations between the Allies and the difficulty in bringing culture back to the shattered city. Leo Borchard, the first post-war conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was shot by an over-zealous American sentry. The orchestra’s chief conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, had fled to Switzerland at the end of the war, and the Western powers had banned him from the stage. His crime was to have performed before Hitler, both in Berlin and at Bayreuth, despite his early resistance to the cultural policies of the Third Reich. During the war Borchard been a part of an underground resistance group called Onkel Emil. He had managed to charm the Soviet authorities by speaking their language (he was born in St Petersburg). Having obtained the Russians’ trust, on 12 May he cycled across Berlin with his friends to have a look at the Philharmonie Concert Hall. He was going to steal a march on Furtwängler and take advantage of his Swiss exile to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic. Ruth Friedrich wondered if Furtwängler had ever pitched up at the concert hall like this. ‘A gruesome still life revealed itself among the shattered arcades’ - where Bruno Walter (and more recently Furtwängler) had once directed the orchestra, there lay a dead horse.109

  Borchard knew how to deal with the Soviets. He obtained larger rations for the Philharmonic’s musicians: ‘you can’t blow a trumpet with a rumbling stomach’.110 By 26 May he was performing Mozart, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Titania Palast to an audience of starving, ragged Berliners.111 He conducted the orchestra twenty-two times before his death. That fateful Thursday he and his mistress, Ruth Friedrich, had been invited to dinner with a music-loving British colonel. It had been a real treat: sandwiches made from white bread filled with proper meat, and whisky. They talked passionately about Bach, so much so that they missed the curfew which came into force at 11 p.m. The colonel decided to drive them home himself. The night before there had been shots exchanged between Russian and American soldiers, and the Americans had issued orders to stop all cars heading towards the Eastern Sector. The sentry failed to notice that the vehicle was British because the hea
dlights were too bright and signalled the colonel to stop as he drove under the S-Bahn bridge towards the Bundesplatz. He had meant to aim at the tyres, but managed to shoot Borchard through the head. He was killed instantly.112

  Autumn 1945

  Berliners had got used to conditions in their city by September, but it came as a shock to others, especially those who had enjoyed relative prosperity in the south-west. Ursula von Kardorff finally made it back to Berlin at the beginning of the autumn, having left in February. Food was very scarce, and the people shared the same, half-mad look as a result of their experiences since the Russian conquest. She stayed with her friend Bärchen on the Savigny Platz, in a room without an outside wall. Berliners called such buildings Sperlings-Lust, or ‘Sparrows’ Delight’, because at any moment you might take off into thin air. She went out on the Kurfürstendamm. The ban on frat was not being closely observed: she noticed elegantly dressed German girls milling around the American, British and French soldiers. There was jazz playing in establishments offering hot drinks but no solid food.

  Ursula von Kardorff borrowed a bicycle to look at the city centre. The Wilhelmstrasse had vanished, the Foreign Office was just a ruin. Only the ProMi was still undamaged. On the Pariser Platz the Adlon Hotel was a burned-out shell. Her own house had collapsed. On the square there was a huge statue of Stalin.