Authors: Rebecca West
All these statues except the two women, the empress with the marble hat and the girl with none, were picked up and moved by Hitler. He did not want anything to remind the people of the Hohenzollerns or their servants or their victories. The vast column commemorating the three wars he moved into the Tiergarten, almost a mile down the avenue, and he set down the statues of Bismarck and Moltke and Roon round it; and he transferred the Sieges Allee to an unfrequented part of the park. It may be argued that the German people showed culpable negligence in not taking this act of extravagance and folly as a warning and rising against Hitler. Even if the Germans did not know about the concentration camps they must have known about this transfer of statuary. Should an American President move the Washington Square Arch to Brooklyn and the Lincoln Memorial to a playground in Georgetown, or a British Prime Minister move the Albert Memorial to a public garden in Hammersmith, and did so for political reasons, even if the mass of the population did not suspect anything, the people who worked round him would, and restrictive action would be taken.
The statues gained by the change. They were set deeper among the trees, they lost their smugness, they looked as if they were part of the setting of a romantic drama. But at the end of the war they had suffered a further change which lifted them out of their poor place as artifacts into Lear’s kingdom of loss. The trees of the Tiergarten had in 1946 been nearly all destroyed. Some were burned in the air raids, others were hit by Russian artillery during the battle for the capital, most of them were cut down by the freezing population during the first winter after the war. Now the great park was nothing but a vast potato patch, with here and there a row of vegetables and a plot of tobacco plants. From this naked land rose the statues in starkly inappropriate prominence. Above them the column of the three victorious wars was surmounted by the French flag, since this was in the French Sector, and the horizon was bounded by riddled cliffs which were once splendid villas and apartment houses. But, as well as this landscape-wide humiliation, they had suffered more private troubles. The charge that the Red Army is illiterate was forever disproved. The pedestals of Moltke and Roon, the bellies of the women who sprawl round the base of the Bismarck memorial, were scrawled with the names and addresses of Russian soldiers.
The Empress Victoria had lost her marble veil, her marble hat, her marble head. Decapitated, she stood among the pergolas. The Sieges Allee had suffered a peculiar loss of the same sort. The statues and busts were left intact; they belong to a kind of realistic art greatly admired by the Russians. But each of the marble loges is decorated on each side by a Hohenzollern eagle, and every one of these had been decapitated, very neatly, and evidently by a suitable instrument. Only the naked girl was as she had been, but there were marks of attempts to get her off her horse. She could be seen a long way off over the bare ground.
There is no statuary at all near the Brandenburger Thor, except a memorial to the Russian troops, which is surmounted by a realistic figure bearing a fantastic resemblance to Mussolini. The sentry who guarded it was, like so many of the Russian soldiers in Berlin, a ravishing small boy, with pink cheeks and a nose that turned up to heaven with the gravity of prayer. But one did not see a large number of troops in the streets of the Russian Sector; and, indeed, few troops were visible in any sector. The machinery of the Four Power control of Berlin was masked; but how many officials were labouring at their desks to coordinate what was too complex to be coordinated became manifest when the traveller found himself uncomfortably uncoordinated. This inevitably happened to those who took this route to Nuremberg, for authority in England had allowed travellers to the trial to take with them letters of credit, which, however, new currency regulations that had just come into effect made it extremely difficult to cash, a turn of events which seemed to surprise authority in Germany as much as the travellers. But even when finesse of a hardly defensible kind got the letters of credit cashed in British scrip money, there was the problem of buying a plane ticket to Nuremberg, which had to be paid for in dollars. Newspapermen in the hotel in the Kurfürstendam which was the Berlin press camp affirmed that British scrip could be turned into American scrip in a certain bar; and authority, asked for an assurance that this could safely be done without risk of deportation, looked embarrassed and pretended not to hear. In the bar the service was rendered by a number of persons whose manner was disconcerting, for they voluptuously drooped their lids and dilated their nostrils while haggling over the exchange value of British and American scrip, in obedience to habits formed before the war, when they lived by procuring cocaine and other pleasures of the flesh. It was an odd experience to owe to authority. But let none mock at such disorganization. No great international event can be efficiently organized. There are conceivable feats of coordination which are beyond performance.
There came an afternoon which, it seemed to the two correspondents who had met on the plane from London, might well be spent visiting the Führerbunker, the air-raid shelter under Hitler’s Chancellery. But authority pronounced that impossible. It was in the Russian Sector, and the Russians had set their face against any more visitors, and had just recently flatly refused to let a very distinguished party of Britons see it. It was plain that there was complete understanding on this point between the Four Powers’ administrations at a high level; and from this, given the incoherence of the general situation, a conclusion could be drawn. It proved to be sound. The place was quite easy to visit. From the shadows a courteous and informed presence detached itself, who knew the terrain well, who had visited it often from the very first days after the fall of Berlin, who was anxious to earn some cigarettes, which were then the only hand-to-hand German currency. He knew at what point it was prudent to stop the Allied automobile, which had come into service for the afternoon’s expedition without anybody’s consent or knowledge, but not against anybody’s expressed wish. The Russian sentry at the portal, snub-nosed and squat and smiling, was glad to see visitors, glad to accept a carton of cigarettes.
The Chancellery was another of these Berlin shells, flooded with sallow light; and the yellow-skinned Russian sentries, standing about in its vast punctured halls, looked like so many submerged Buddhas. In Hitler’s Hall of Mirrors, a specially genial soul, with several chins and jolly slit eyes, who had been impassively watching a party of workmen hacking down the slabs of marble and porphyry which lined the walls between the shattered mirrors or their empty sockets, complained that people were losing interest in the place and hardly ever came there now. Another soldier paced out the Banqueting Hall to show its excessive length, which seemed to him a huge joke. It was obvious that none of them had ever heard of any order that visitors must be excluded. It might have been, however, that the Russians had meant to give such an order. They may have wanted the world to forget the bunker. This was probable because of the difference between the Allies regarding Hitler’s fate. It was the British and American theory that Hitler had committed suicide in the bunker on April 30, 1945, and the Russian authorities publicly accepted this view. But in Moscow at the end of May and in June, and again in July at Potsdam, Stalin informed various American officials that he believed Hitler to be still alive; and this was in 1946 (and indeed up till Stalin’s death) the Soviet doctrine.
The bunker, however, was wide open to anyone who cared to call. The Chancellery filled a corner site, the two blocks containing the Gallery of Mirrors and the Banqueting Hall forming a right angle, within which lay a garden, now overgrown with long grasses. Under a tree which autumn had just touched two English soldiers sat with two German girls on a pile of bricks. One was rhythmically squeezing his girl’s waist and the other was stroking his girl’s bosom with a slow, massaging movement, therapeutic rather than voluptuous, which suggested that he might at one time have been in the Royal Army Medical Corps, while they carried on a repetitive argument about football. The girls’ faces were quite blank, as if they belonged to some contemplative order of prostitutes. A young Russian soldier stood near them, watching them as if there was a long chance, on which he was not counting but which he had to admit existed, that they might do something novel and unexpected. Behind him was the door into the
Führer-bunker,
which he was delighted to open for visitors even before they produced cigarettes. Like his comrades, he enjoyed company.
A steep staircase descended fifty feet to the rooms in which Hitler and Eva Braun, Goebbels and his wife and six children, had died. These rooms were extremely disconcerting because of their proportions. Hitler’s Chancellery, like all the buildings for which he was responsible, was vast because it was the result of a soiled and limited flight of the imagination. A man who sold patent medicine at a carnival, and was an abortionist and a fortune-teller on the side, might, if he had been granted power to build as he would, have remembered pictures he had seen of Egyptian temples and Roman palaces and, not remembering them clearly enough, have given orders for such huge, featureless constructions. But the thirty rooms in the bunker, though Hitler had had the resources of Germany to lavish on it, were in shocking contrast with the swollen halls above them. For an air-raid shelter it was perversely sordid. The rooms were small squares, the size of bathrooms in an ordinary suburban house, with a central passage cut into three sections about the size of a compartment in an English railway train, which served as the general dining room and sitting room and the conference room. The walls were coated with some substance resembling lamp black, on which many soldiers had since the end of the war written their signatures. This was the time of Chads, when the English people’s reaction to shortages was expressed on every blank space by drawings showing a bald head with a single up-growing hair poking over the top of a wall, with the legend, “What, no soap?” or sugar, or whatever it was that was most drearily lacking. Here a British soldier had drawn a Chad who looked over the wall and said, “What, no Führer?” These signatures and his drawing came out ghostly white on the black wall. It was as if one stood in a train that was quietly running into hell.
The Russian soldier pointed to the Chad and laughed. He did not know what the Chad was saying but he knew that it was meant to be funny, and he wanted everything to be funny, and he imagined he was helping things along in that direction by laughing. The courteous German presence nodded his head and smiled at him, to show his good will, and said, “Look, this is very singular. This curious cupboard place was called the
Hundebunker,
the dog bunker. Hitler’s bodyguard used to sit here, and so it might just have been a nickname, but I think not; it is so oddly shaped a room that I think it really was designed for some pet dog. And you will see it is far more generously planned than any of the accommodation for human beings.”
Suddenly it became very unpleasant to be in this insanely devised rat hole, where six children had been murdered by their father and mother, for no particular reason, since surely the Goebbels must have had relatives to whom they could have confided their family. It seemed good to run upstairs into the garden, pushing past one of the British soldiers and his girl, who were standing against the bunker door being photographed by his comrade. The Russian soldier followed and, wagging his head and smiling, repeated something over and over again. He was saying that he too often got very frightened, terribly frightened, at being so deep underground. “They are often very kind,” said the courteous German presence. He meant the Russians. Yet during the drive from the press camp he had been saying that because of what he had seen when the Red Army entered Berlin he wanted to leave the city, though he had been born here, and never see it again; and he was speaking the truth, for a wave of sickness turned him green as he spoke. He was always thinking of the Russians, whose might was a sea round the small island of safety where he had a foothold. All Berliners were always thinking of the Russians. It was that preoccupation which made them different from the Nurembergers.
The system, with all its failures, got the travellers to Nuremberg in good time. At once a split appeared between those who had come to the trial for, say, the opening and these last two days, and those who had a longer experience of the sessions. The court had issued a directive that no photographs were to be taken of the defendants at the times they were being sentenced. This seemed to some journalists who had just arrived a shocking interference with the rights of the press, and even some historians thought that it would leave the film record of the case regrettably incomplete. But those who had frequented the court over months were for the most part of a different mind.
The issue pricked deep because it was certain that some of the defendants would be sentenced to death. It seemed that when people had never seen a man, or had seen him only once or twice, they did not find anything offensive about the idea of photographing him while he was being sentenced to death, but that if people had seen him often the idea became unattractive. The correspondents who had attended the court day in, day out, knew how the defendants had hated the periods of each session when it was part of the routine for the cameras to be put on. Most of them reached for their black glasses when the sharp and acid lights were switched on, with a sullenness which meant that they were doing more than merely trying to save their eyes; and those who most often resorted to those black glasses were those who had manifested the greatest repentance. Dr. Frank, who had murdered Poland and had been driven by remorse into a Catholic conversion which the authorities believed to be sincere, was always the first to put out his hand to his spectacle case. It might be right to hang such men. But it could not be right to photograph them when they were being told that they were going to be hanged. For when society has to hurt a man it must hurt him as little as possible and must preserve what it can of his pride, lest there should spread in that society those feelings which make men do the things for which they get hanged.