Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship

by Kerstin Lieff

  My mother’s handwriting has always been difficult for me to read. Many, if not most, of her handwritten words look to be a series of ws, ms, ns, and us. I have learned since, it is because she went to grammar school at a time when handwriting was still taught in the Sütterlin script. My uncle Axel once again came to my rescue. He happened to have grown up in an era when students were taught handwriting in both Sütterlin and Latin. He was all too happy to transcribe her letters to typewritten form, so that I could translate from them. I am deeply indebted to him for all his studious help. Without Axel, this story would not have nearly as much German character, and the historical and geographical detail would have been much more vague, drab even.

  To express my deep thanks to those who saw this book’s potential, and who encouraged me to move forward and “keep writing,” is a near impossibility. It begins with Peter Thompson, my amazing translation professor, who read some of my mother’s letters and exclaimed, “These need to be published!” It was through his selfless persistence that I eventually met Judith Weber, my agent, whose incredible patience and encouragement caused this book to come to be. Thank you, Judith, for all your helpful work! Tom Kennedy, as my professor and mentor, I cannot thank enough for his kind prodding and insights in helping with my manuscript, and for encouraging me when I wanted to give up. Victor Rangel is a dear man I’ve never met other than through e-mail, yet his online comments and insights were invaluable. And then dear Anna Bliss, my editor, my patient editor—I believe my mother, from her side of the grave, has fallen in love with her! Because of her, each sentence and every scene was meticulously groomed. I owe her my heartfelt gratitude and compliments for an eye that would not leave a single word unnoticed, or an event not researched. I would be remiss if I did not mention my writer buddies who spent two years with me on this project, reading chapters, analyzing and critiquing, nursing this manuscript to bring it to what it has become. Paige, Scott, Margaret, and Phil, you know who you are: This book would not be if it weren’t for you! To the many friends and family members who’ve stood by me throughout this process—the names so many, they’d fill another page and I’d be afraid to forget one of you—thank you for putting up with me.

  Finally, my mother must not be forgotten in these acknowledgments. It was she whose courage it took to live through those dreadful years and then to talk about them fifty years later. Her eternal optimism and strength in the face of extreme hardships has been an inspiration throughout my life. I hope the passion she had for living is recognized in the pages of this memoir.

  Endnotes

  1Swinemünde, a city in an area of Germany once called Pomerania, is now in Poland and has been renamed Świnoujście.

  2Margarete’s father probably oversaw the operations of a lignite mine.

  3The Enabling Act, passed by the parliament on March 23, 1933, gave Hitler’s dictatorship the right to exist.

  4At the Nazi rally in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935, Hitler announced the ratification of the Nuremberg Laws, which, among a number of other points, revoked German citizenship for Jews and forbade marriage, or even extramarital relationships, between Jews and Aryans.

  5Margarete was mistaken. The Nazis did allow officers to join the Nazi Party, unlike the former Weimar Republic, which kept their party affiliation on hold while in service. However, even during the Nazi era, most officers chose not to join the Partei anyway and, as had been the custom prior to the rise of Hitler’s regime, stayed “party-neutral.”

  6The Wehrmacht was the term for the German armed forces between 1935 and 1945.

  7As a half Jew, Hilde was allowed to attend the Tanzschule. Only official organizations, such as the Hitler Youth and the BDM, withheld memberships from Jews. Although various sources state vague or conflicting standards as to who was deemed Jewish and who was deemed Aryan, Margarete said the “Jewish laws” related to anyone with more than one-eighth Jewish blood. If she was right, her Annenpass would support that, as it certified her genealogy ten generations back.

  8This law was actually not enacted until after July 20, 1944.

  9Margarete was somehow mistaken. The war was declared on September 1, 1939, but that date fell on a Friday. They were either at the beach on a Friday, which seems unlikely as the children would have been at school, or the announcement said that food was going to be rationed.

  10Although Margarete remembers being hungry right from the beginning of the war, when food was rationed, real food shortages did not occur in Germany until the years just after the war. Her memories may well have been influenced by the change in food supplies, such as the Gulaschkanonen she describes and the new bread made with ever more creative “ersatz” ingredients.

  11To be clear, Germans were not starving during the war years. Food, although rationed, was available. The true hunger remembered by the Germans from that time occurred during the first years after the war during the Allied Occupation.

  12I.G. Farbenindustrie is infamously known for having provided the stabilizer to produce Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used to kill humans in the gas chambers during the Holocaust.

  13The Völkischer Beobachter (Observer of the German Folk) was the official Nazi newspaper from 1920 to 1945. Volk means people, nation, tribe, race; in Nazi parlance, völkisch meant “pure German” and by extension “anti-Semitic.”

  14I have not been able to verify this. I do not know if this “first bomb” happened during the first RAF bombing raids of Berlin, or during the much more serious raids two years later.

  15The RAF bombed Berlin in 1940 on August 26, August 28, September 23, and September 25, and then nearly every day from then through December 21. Then suddenly the bombings over Berlin stopped until March 1, 1943, at which time the bombs were much more sophisticated and devastating. From the descriptions Margarete gives of these nights in the bunkers, it is possible that they occurred after March 1, 1943.

  16Margarete was incorrect in calling this wind a true firestorm, as such firestorms did not, of record, occur in Berlin. It is also possible that this scene occurred after 1943, when much heavier and more destructive bombardments fell on Berlin.

  17Margarete is referring to Operation Gomorrah, a bombing campaign on Hamburg that began July 24, 1943. The bombing, which lasted eight days, has been called “the Hiroshima of Germany.”

  18Brest-Litovsk is now Brest, Poland.

  19Large gas-filled Fesselballons—captive or tethered balloons—would release a thick haze when enemy aircraft were sighted, in hopes of camouflaging important public works and factories.

  20Buchenwald concentration camp was just twenty kilometers from Jena.

  21Although my mother wanted me to know that even Americans bombed innocent civilian ships, the most famous sinking of a refugee ship in the Baltic was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, which was hit by a Russian torpedo.

  22Margarete is referring to General Patton.

  23From the description, he may have been a field marshal, not a general.

  24Raoul Wallenberg was a member of the Swedish royalty, known primarily for issuing Swedish passports to the Jewish population of Budapest, Hungary, saving tens of thousands from potential capture by the Nazis.

  25No Swedish church could be found to have been near the Invaliden U-Bahn station. However, there were, and still are, two Swedish churches in Wilmersdorf, a borough very near her home in Charlottenburg. Margarete may have forgotten that she and Helga took several forms of transportation to the U-Bahn station on that memorable night.

  26Margarete incorrectly called it Camp One. In fact, it was a prison camp, well known for its detention of German officers, but named Camp 27, and they were in Zone One.

  27It is now known that Raoul Wallenberg entered the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow on February 6, 1945, half a year before Margarete’s train left Berlin, making it impossible that he could have organized such an endeavor.

  28Anna Iwanowna must have made a great impression on Margarete, because s
he always called her by both her given name and her patronymic. She was also mentioned in Margarete’s diary, this time with a surname: Anna Iwanowna Ladowitsch. Susanne Erichsen, in her autobiography, Ein Nerz und eine Krone, mentions her as well. The spelling, however, is different: Anna Ivanowna.

  29After her release from the Gulag, Susanne Erichsen was crowned Miss Germany 1950 and Miss Europe 1950 and later became one of Germany’s most beloved high-fashion models. After working in New York, she was nicknamed das Fräuleinwunder, the girl wonder of Germany. Shortly before her death in 2002, she published her autobiography, Ein Nerz und eine Krone (A Mink and a Crown).

  30Margarete’s birth father, Werner, was a mining engineer who told her many stories about his work. Thus an English word like “lignite” would not have been unusual for her, a woman foreign to that language, to know.

  31Although Margarete never told what happened with the babies, Anne Applebaum, in her Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gulag: A History, describes some of the women’s ordeals with regard to this issue.

  32Although she says they were “the poor ones,” the kulaks were those peasants who refused to give up their lands for the collective farms. Many of them were actually quite well off before they were either imprisoned or exiled to Siberia.

  33It is possible that the train stopped in Brest, where the Russian broad-gauge tracks meet the European standard gauge. However, Margarete mentions Brest later in her dialogue. She may have forgotten or, in her memory, collapsed two train stations into one. The story remains as she told it: “somewhere in the wide-open nothingness of Russia.”

  34When Gronenfelde was closed for good in 1950, more than one million German prisoners returning from Russian Gulags had passed through its gates.

  35The Schlesischer Bahnhof is today’s Ostbahnhof.

  36After 1945 the Allied occupying governments required all German citizens to carry identification documents to travel from one sector to another. In the city of Berlin, citizens needed travel documents to cross even between the sectors in their own city. With the issuance of these passports, officials hoped to mitigate the huge influx of refugees fleeing the east, and it was also an effort to find former Nazis.

  37Königsberg is now Kaliningrad in the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia.

  38HVP: Hauptverbandplatz, the “main bandaging station” or “main first aid station.”

  39Ivan was the nickname for the Russians, Tomy (or Tommy in English) for the British.

  40Himmler was, up until that time, the appointed Reichsführer of the SS.

  41Possibly this date was his birthday or their anniversary.

  42PGs: Parteigenosse, the official members of the NSDAP, the Nazi Party.

  43Sankas: Sanitärskraftwagen, ambulances used during the war.

  44Frau Steffens may have been a housemate in Franzel’s home, or perhaps a housekeeper. Her identity is not known.

  45OP: Operating room.

  46Urrä-urrä: The Russian war cry often heard as they began an assault.

  47Uffz: Unteroffizier, a noncommissioned officer.

  48Grand Admiral Dönitz, of the German navy, was named by Hitler as his successor.

  49Gauleiter: District commander.

  50“Werewolf” was a vernacular term for the Hitler Youth who fought against the Russians in the final battle for Berlin.

  51Professor Sauerbruch was a well-known surgeon and professor at the Charité Institute, the university for medicine in Berlin.

  52July 10: Margarete’s birthday.

  53DRK: Deutsches rote Kreutz, the German Red Cross.

  54Torresschluss is literally translated as “the locking of the gates.” It stems from the Middle Ages, when the city gates were locked just before sundown. Those who did not make it back into the city before Torresschluss had to sleep outside the gates.

  Selected Bibliography

  BOOKS

  Anonymous. A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City. Translated by Philip Boehm. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.

  Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. Rev. ed. Translated by R. H. Fuller and Irmgard Booth. London: SCM, 1959.

  Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children. Translated by David Hare. New York: Arcade, 1996.

  Dönhoff, Marion, Countess. Before the Storm: Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia. Translated by Jean Steinberg. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

  Erichsen, Susanne. Ein Nerz und eine Krone [A Mink and a Crown]. With Dorothée Hansen. Munich: Econ, 2003.

  Frazier, Ian. “On the Prison Highway: The Gulag’s Silent Remains.” New Yorker, August 30, 2010, 28–34.

  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: A Tragedy. Translated by Walter Arndt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

  Grass, Günther. Peeling the Onion. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.

  Hautzig, Esther. The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1968.

  Kobak, Annette. Joe’s War: My Father Decoded. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

  Lonely Planet. Germany. London: Lonely Planet, 2004.

  ———. Russia. 5th ed. London: Lonely Planet, 2009.

  Moorhouse, Roger. Berlin at War. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

  Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House, 1982.

  Ryan, Cornelius. The Last Battle. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966.

  Sandulescu, Jacques. Donbas: A True Story of an Escape Across Russia. New York: David McKay, 1968.

  Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2001.

  ———. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1996.

  ———. On the Natural History of Destruction. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2003.

  Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.

  Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago. Vols. 1–3. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper and Row, 1974–78.

  Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

  Treibgut des Krieges: Zeugnisse von Flucht und Vertreibung der Deutschen [Flotsam of the war: Germans’ testimonies of escape and expulsion]. Kassel: Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, 2008.

  FILMS

  Flitton, Dave. Occult History of the Third Reich. Montreal: Castle Lamancha Co. (UK), 1992. Documentary, 155 min.

  Grede, Kjell. Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg. Budapest: FilmTeknik, 1990. Drama, 118 min.

  Hachmeister, Lutz, and Michael Kloft. The Goebbels Experiment. New York: First Run Features, 2005. Documentary, 155 min.

  Isbouts, Jean-Pierre, and William A. Schwartz. Operation Valkyrie: The Stauffenberg Plot to Kill Hitler. Santa Monica, CA: Pantheon Studios, 2008. Documentary, 108 min.

  Müller, Ray. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Strasbourg: Arte, 1993. Documentary, 180 min.

  Rees, Laurence. The Nazis: A Warning From History. New York: A&E Television Networks, 1998. 6-part documentary miniseries.

  ———. Scorched Earth. London: BBC, 1999. Documentary, 200 min.

  Staudte, Wolfgang. Die Mörder sind unter uns. Babelsberg and Johannisthal, Germany: Deutsche Film, 1946. Drama, 91 min. Released in the United States as Murderers Among Us, 1948.

  Many heartfelt thanks go to the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. for their kind help in providing statistics regarding human casualties resulting from the Second World War.

 

 

 
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