Authors: Roger Moorhouse
name suggests, it played requests from soldiers at the front, and from
their families back home, thereby providing a vital channel for messages
between the two. Each programme opened with:
Liebe Soldaten, Liebe
Hörer in der Heimat, Liebe Freunde jenseits der Grenze
(‘Dear soldiers, dear listeners at home, dear friends beyond the frontier’), and then gave a
list of those units and individuals who had requested a particular tune.
The tone of the programme was upbeat, offering the home front a
dose of escapism, and giving soldiers an uplifting vision of ‘normality’
back home.41
The music itself tended to be popular German fare, rather than clas-
sical. To this end, so-called
Volksmusik
, or ‘people’s music’ – schmaltzy patriotic tunes, such as ‘
Glocken der Heimat
’ (‘Bells of the Homeland’)
– tended to predominate. Military themes were also ever-present,
including the rousing
Panzerlied
, and the song of the Afrika Korps,
‘
Panzer rollen in Afrika vor
’ (‘Panzers roll in Africa’).
The favourites of German stage and screen also received regular airings,
such as Zarah Leander and Marika Rökk. Indeed, one of the most famous
songs of the war, after ‘
Lili Marleen
’, was Leander’s saccharine ‘
Ich weiss
,
es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’
(‘I know a miracle will happen’),
which was taken from the hit film
Die Grosse Liebe
(‘The Great Love’).
Sung in Leander’s trademark deep contralto voice, with its extravagantly
rolled ‘r’s, it would become one of the theme tunes of the German
home front.
Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n
und dann werden tausend Märchen wahr.
Ich weiss, so schnell kann keine Liebe vergehn,
die so gross ist und so wunderbar.
I know, one day a miracle will happen
And then a thousand fairy tales will come true
I know that a love cannot die so quickly
That is so great and so wonderful.
Naturally perhaps for a programme that borrowed so much from
218
berlin at war
the silver screen, the
Wunschkonzert
quickly spawned a cinema
spin-off of its own. The film
Wunschkonzert
– with Ilse Werner and
Carl Raddatz in the leads – told the story of two lovers, separated
by the war, who are reunited by the radio request show. After its
premiere in Berlin in December 1940, Goebbels noted its ‘magnifi-
cent reception’42 and congratu lated himself – he had, after all, come
up with the idea.
Wunschkonzert
would go on to be one of the most
commercially successful films of the Third Reich.
Radio did not only serve as a source of light entertainment and distrac-
tion. It could also be a life-saver.
Drahtfunk
, or ‘wire radio’, had been tested in the 1930s and was later introduced in Berlin and a few other
parts of the Reich. It was essentially a forerunner of modern broad-
band, offering radio signals via the telephone cables, with the advan-
tage that such signals could not be jammed or disrupted and suffered
only limited interference.
Drahtfunk
could therefore be used as an emergency radio network.
From 1943, when the Allied bombing campaign against Germany was
reaching a new intensity, conventional
Reichssender
radio was switched
off when enemy aircraft were approaching, for fear that their navigators
might be able to home in on radio transmissions. On signing off, the
Reichssender
would advise its listeners to switch over to
Drahtfunk
. This was achieved by plugging the radio set into a splitter box on the telephone cable, and tuning to the appropriate frequency.
Drahtfunk
did not broadcast programmes or music; rather, it advised
solely on the progress of enemy air attacks. As Berliner Gisela Richter
remembered: ‘The reports went something like this: “Enemy bomber
squadrons approaching the territory of the Reich!” After a while:
“Enemy bomber squadrons in the grid square Gustav/Heinrich (G/H)
flying in the direction of Emil/Nordpol (E/N) and so on.” G/H was
always dangerous for Berlin. When those letters were given, we knew
it was our turn.’43
In time, the system would become more sophisticated. When Allied
bombers reached the area of Hanover and Braunschweig, the warning
siren would be sounded in the capital; and when Stendal and Rathenau
– fifty miles to the west of Berlin – were overflown, the air raid siren
would wail into life. The longer the war progressed, however, the more
unreliable the siren became, sometimes only being sounded when
the people’s friend
219
enemy aircraft were already in the skies above the capital. The early
warning provided by
Drahtfunk
, therefore, allowed Berliners to get down
to their shelters in good time. Ernst Schmidt remembered his father
listening in to the ‘wire radio’ and then ordering the family to leave
their home. ‘We joined a tide of people flowing down to the shelter’,
he recalled, ‘and father told us that the alarm would not be sounded
for another ten minutes.’44
Others tuned in to the broadcasts of the local air defence network,
the so-called
Flaksender
or
Myosender
, where more thoroughgoing reports of enemy air movements were given. Peter Jung’s father was
a regular listener:
My father had got hold of maps, not intended for the public, which
showed Germany divided into grid-squares, each one labelled with a
letter of the alphabet. Every evening, around six or seven o’clock, the
game began anew: the map would be spread out on the table and the
radio would be tuned to the frequency of the Berlin control room to
hear if enemy planes had entered the Reich’s airspace. If the control
room was already transmitting, then one heard . . . announcements in
the form of grid references with additional geographical locations. . . .
In order to follow the individual bomber squadrons, my father gave me
the various counters from our game of Ludo, while the direction of
flight was marked with matches. . . . When a squadron reached the area
of Brandenburg an der Havel, it was clear that Berlin was the target.
Then it was time to turn off the radio and go down into the cellar.45
Radio enjoyed a chequered career in Hitler’s Germany. That which
had begun as a propaganda tool of the first order had changed into
a source of information and entertainment for the public, before
morphing again into a valuable survival tool during the air war. The
number of civilian lives saved by this simple technology is unknown,
but it must be considered to be substantial. One might conclude that,
in this aspect alone, radio truly proved its status as ‘the eighth Great
Power’.
11
The Watchers and the Watched
In the early hours of 13 June 1942, residents in Kleine Markusstrasse in
Friedrichshain were woken by a disturbance on the street outside. It
would not have been an unusual occurrence. Friedrichshain was one
of the traditional working-class districts of the capital and so would
have been alive with all the noise and commotion of urban life. In
the 1930s, as one of the hotbeds of ‘red Berlin’, the district had seen
numerous running street battles between communists and ‘brown-
shirts’. It had even been christened ‘Horst-Wessel-Stadt’ by the Nazis,
after their most famous martyr, who was murdered there in 1930.1
On that warm June night, the brawling in the street was evidently
serious or loud enough for one resident to call the police. When they
arrived, order was quickly restored and the miscreants were bundled
into a police van. Most of them would duly face a charge of affray,
or disorderly conduct, and be fined by a judge before being released.
But for one of them, the consequences would be much more serious.
One of those arrested that night was Bruno Wattermann, a Romany.
A slightly gaunt man, in his mid-twenties, with a fashionable pencil
moustache, Wattermann had been born in Stettin on the Baltic coast
and had spent much of his early life on the road, living in a traditional
caravan. As a young man, he had then settled in Berlin, where he
scraped a living as an occasional horse dealer.
He had been in trouble with the authorities before. In 1938, he had
been arrested under the catch-all of ‘anti-social behaviour’, as he was of
no fixed address, and was sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald,
where he had remained for fourteen months. However, as his Gestapo
file ominously concluded, this punishment appears to have made ‘little
impression’ on him.2
Under interrogation, following the brawl in Friedrichshain, Wattermann
the watchers and the watched
221
told his story. After his release from Buchenwald, he had returned to
Berlin and attempted to ‘go straight’, finding work at a Blaupunkt factory
in nearby Kreuzberg. But he had found himself unable to keep to the
routine of everyday life and soon was regularly absenting himself from
work, claiming illness. After being fired, he found another position at a
factory in Neukölln, but the old habits recurred and he was finally hauled
before a local court and fined 40 Reichsmarks for his persistent absen-
teeism. During the year before his arrest, it transpired, Wattermann had
been absent from work for twenty weeks.3
Aside from his apparent inability to hold down a job, Wattermann
also suffered because of his racial background. Nazi Germany viewed
the 30,000 or so Sinti and Roma within the German population much
as they viewed the Jews – as alien bloodstock that ought to be removed.
Thus, most of the racial laws that were applied to German Jews also
applied to German gypsies – they were forbidden to intermarry or even
have sexual relations with Germans, and were liable to special taxes.
Moreover, they could face sterilisation or arbitrary imprisonment.4
So the odds were stacked against Bruno Wattermann receiving a
fair hearing from the Berlin Gestapo. To make matters worse,
Wattermann had been drunk at the time of his arrest, and his inter-
rogators quickly suspected that he was dabbling in the black market,
selling textiles and even diamonds. Ordinarily, this combination of
minor infractions and unconfirmed suspicions might have sufficed for
a suspect to be fined or released with a warning. In Wattermann’s
case however, the conclusion of the Gestapo was stark and un -
equi vocal. Not only was he a ‘gypsy’, the report stated, he also
‘belonged to those asocial elements which refuse to pursue regular
work and persistently seek to lead a carefree life at the expense of the
German people’. Many warnings and punishments, it said, had been
without effect, and Wattermann had demonstrated that ‘he absolutely
will not improve himself’ and had proved a ‘serious disturbance’ to
the public. The report concluded that it was unacceptable for him
to remain ‘at liberty’.5
Later that summer, two months after his arrest – and without trial
– Wattermann was designated an ‘asocial’ and was sent for indefinite
detention with hard labour to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen
near Berlin.6
* * *
222
berlin at war
The Gestapo, or
Geheime Staatspolizei
– Secret State Police – stood at the very heart of the Nazi regime. Synonymous – along with the SS – with
the Nazi ‘terror’, its origins were rather more mundane. It had been
established in 1933, emerging out of the old Prussian political police, and
had subsequently taken its place among the constellation of acronyms
that populated the German police network. Along with the criminal
police,
Kriminalpolizei
(or Kripo), which investigated serious criminal cases, the Gestapo fell under the umbrella of the security police, the
Sicherheitspolizei
(or Sipo). Regular, everyday policing, meanwhile, was
handled by the so-called order police, the
Ordnungspolizei
(or Orpo). By
1939, all of these organisations, which operated nationwide, were sub -
ordinated to the Reich Main Security Office, the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(or RSHA), and ultimately, Heinrich Himmler’s SS.
But the Gestapo was not just another police unit. Its primary role was
to act as a political police force – to investigate and combat all activities
that were deemed dangerous or inimical to the Nazi state. It did not,
however, practise the same randomised persecution and killing that had
been witnessed in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Gestapo ‘terror’ was not
random. It did not kill by quota, or terrorise its would-be victims by its
own unpredictability or caprice. It was very targeted, seeking to weed
out political criminals and focus very specifically on those whom the
regime decreed to be ‘undesirable’. A glance at its internal structure