After the Reich (13 page)

The occupation followed the usual pattern of three waves: first came the bombardment and the armies; these were replaced by the second force that took possession of the land, and anything else for that matter, including the women; and finally the Poles came in their wake. The last chunk of Silesia to be taken was the county of Glatz and the Riesengebirge mountains, which fell to the Red Army only after the ceasefire, so that at least the quaint villages and the town of Glatz were spared destruction.
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After the initial rage and lust abated, the Soviet armies turned their hands to demontage. On 1 June they dismantled the power station at Kraftborn. The major factories went next, followed by street lights, overhead cables and freight trains. The
soldateska
continued to steal watches, window frames, wheelbarrows and bicycles. They also took every piano they could find.

In the Upper Silesian town of Steinau one mother of two small children frankly described her ordeal at the hands of the Red Army: ‘A young Russian with a pistol in his hand came to fetch me. I have to admit that I was so frightened (and not just of the pistol) that I could not hold my bladder. That didn’t disturb him in the least. You got used to it soon enough and realised there was no point in putting up a fight.’
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Later she went with her heavily pregnant sister to see a Russian doctor, believing that he would be a civilised man. They were both raped by the medic and a lieutenant, even though she herself was menstruating. That was no disincentive either.
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The soldiers raped every female they found; one twelve-year-old girl complained of the terrible tearing they had caused her. On another occasion when all the surviving Steinauer were taking refuge in a cellar and the women were once again threatened with gang rape, this same mother gave her children coffee that had been laced with poison. But the dose was not strong enough to do them any harm. She thought she was doing the right thing then: ‘I can only assure people that a mother never believes herself more holy than at that moment.’ When she was subjected to what she feared would be rape by an entire platoon, she remembered a Russian word for ‘child’. The rapist got up and escorted her from the room, before the eyes of the others waiting their turn. The Steinau woman repeated the story - often told - that the Russians treated children with kindness. She had seen a tank come up to a child in the middle of a road and the driver climb out and pick up the boy and place him on the pavement.
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Peace came to Europe two days after the Russians took Breslau. The Breslauer scarcely noticed. The remaining German citizens were well behind the lines. Their fate was mostly decided: unless the Western Allies were capable of pulling a rabbit out of a hat at the Peace Conference, Prussia’s second city would fall to Poland and they would be driven west.

Brandenburg

The Red Army encountered death in all its forms on the road to the German capital. At the Sonnenburg Prison - ‘die Sonne’ as it had been known to its inmates - they found that 800 chiefly foreign prisoners had been slaughtered as recently as 30 January 1945, and it had not been deemed worth while to repatriate them across the Oder.
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The last batch of prisoners to be executed at Brandenburg-Görden were killed on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. The Russians liberated the prison a week later. The Russians, accompanied by Polish soldiers, chanced upon Sachsenhausen concentration camp as they moved to invest Berlin. The camp was in Oranienburg, and the fall of that former royal borough brought it home to Hitler that his days were numbered.

There were just 5,000 prisoners left in Sachsenhausen of a population that had reached 50,000. The rest had been taken on ‘death marches’.
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As in most concentration camps, a number of Sachsenhausen’s prisoners had been out-housed, in this case in smaller camps in Lieberose and Schwarzheide in the Mark Brandenburg. This had been the fate of many of the Jews brought to Sachsenhausen from Slovakia and Auschwitz. As the Russians closed in on the Mark, the prisoners were marched out of the camps towards the coast. Many were beaten to death or shot on the way. The camp administrators, including the notorious Obersturmbannf ührer Höss, also fled from their HQ in Ravensbrück. They ran to the comparative safety of Flensburg to seek out their master Himmler. The latter advised Höss to save his skin by crossing into Denmark. Höss received false papers as Able Seaman Franz Lang, but was caught and hanged for all that.
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In the middle of May, the writer and journalist Margret Boveri finally made it to her country cottage in Teupitz in the Spreewald. She and a Frau Becker undertook a hair-raising journey on bicycles, dodging - successfully and not so successfully - the Soviet troops who wanted to appropriate their valuable vehicles. They found it sinister that the place names had been crossed out and rewritten in Cyrillic script, which they took for a sign that eastern Germany was to be incorporated into the Soviet Empire.

The place seemed to have died, even if most of the houses seemed undamaged from the outside [in the square a few corpses in uniform were lying around, stiff like giant puppets]; the house was completely wrecked behind which we moor the boat on our trips into the little town, the next-door property likewise. On Kohlgarten (our peninsula), I spoke to one man only. He said, ‘My child is dead, my wife in the hospital.’ In my house I found the usual picture of destruction: everything was shattered, smashed and plundered, and the three boats were gone. The clothes had all been taken, just like the food, down to the last grain of salt; the last naturally snatched by our dear compatriots. My archive portfolios were strewn about the place. The oil paint for painting the house had been emptied out and everything was stuck to it. In the flower beds cows and horses had grazed and for the first time we found some proper manure.
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The Schloss had taken the brunt of the destruction: the lords had fled, presumed dead, and the Russians had turned the building into a hospital; despite that they spent the night bawling and brawling and playing gramophone records. The two women made their way back to Berlin. The normally resilient Frau Becker was reduced to tears by the sight of German civilians being marched into captivity. Those who straggled or stumbled were beaten with whips.
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Ruth Friedrich and her doctor friend Frank went on a journey into Brandenburg in pursuit of food. They stopped at a country inn. Eventually a woman came out with a headscarf pulled down over her brow: the usual device to conceal her age from the rapists. Here and there they could see some soiled straw, but nothing else. They asked the peasant woman if she had food. She told them it had all been stolen. ‘Russians or Germans?’ Frank asked. ‘Thieves,’ the woman replied impassively. The pair ran into a trek on the road. These unfortunates were aged between twelve and thirty. One of the children told her, ‘We are all going to die . . . Why not? Death is not the worst thing.’
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Liberation from the West

The Rhineland

The Rhineland was the first part of Germany to be liberated from the west, and the first city was Aachen. The place of Charlemagne’s coronation had been pitilessly pummelled by Anglo-American bombers so that there was little left of it. Of the 15,000 homes in the city only a fifth were vaguely intact. The American-installed administration estimated that they could make the damaged properties habitable within a year, but to rebuild the city would take twenty.
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One of the first Americans into Aachen was Saul Padover, who was then working for the Psychological Warfare Division. He followed behind the troops, interviewing Germans to compile a dossier on their affiliation to Nazism. His memoirs of the campaign provide a variety of snapshots, but many of them are coloured by the anti-German propaganda he was cooking up as he went. In Jülich he found two Flemings who had been living the life of Riley in an air-raid shelter. They believed themselves the only civilians left in the bombed-out town, and had a huge stock of champagne and cognac, tins of food, eggs and chicken. In their ‘drowsy moments’ they read travel books or romantic novels.
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Padover was keen to record the moral loucheness of the German survivors. Wiesbaden ‘was packed with German civilians, many of whom were gaily attired. There were lots of pretty girls, and they smiled at us broadly and invitingly.’
^y
The Americans had entered the spa town on 28 March 1945 and the defenders had prudently tossed their weapons into whatever expanse of water they could find. The Americans fenced off the centre of town with barbed wire and moved into the Hotel Rose. Denazification began on 10 April, when all Pgs and SA men were asked to report to the American authorities.
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Missie Vassiltchikov managed to get herself attached as a nurse to a convoy of children from Bremen who were returning home. They had been sent to Austria after the destruction of the city by bombing. For the Russian-born Missie it was the first time she had seen her country of adoption for a year. The train passed though Munich in the middle of the night. All that remained of the station was ‘a huge iron skeleton’. She caught a glimpse of Nuremberg, Bamberg and Würzburg. They looked much the same - ruins. She jumped train at Fulda and eventually made it to Hanau, Frankfurt and Geisenheim by hitching lifts from engine drivers. She was trying to reach the Metternichs at their bombed-out home among the vines of Schloss Johannisberg in the Rheingau. Her sister Tatiana was married to Prince Paul von Metternich. ‘It took me quite some time to reach the ruined castle. It, too, was a sorry sight. Only one of the gate-houses still stands.’
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The Americans had moved into the Mumm property next door. They were behaving badly - throwing furniture and china out of the windows and giving away the clothes from the wardrobes to the ‘Fräuleins’. Brat von Mumm had just been released from a POW camp near Rheims. He had been arrested at the champagne house that he had taken over in 1940 in the wake of the German advance. It had been seized by the French state in 1914 as a ‘bien d’ennemi’. He was living elsewhere as his house had been declared off-limits. There was not much to eat, but the wine was a consolation. The majordomo served Missie exquisite things, muttering each separate vintage in her ear.
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Elena Skrjabina was another Russian, if not quite as grand as Missie, a relative of the composer. She had been pressed into labour service by the Nazis in Russia and put to work in a factory in Bendorf on the outskirts of Koblenz where she seems to have been well treated. When the Americans arrived in April the Russian girls all feared the worst. Drunken GIs hammered on the door. When that failed they tried to lure the women away from their friends and plundered their meagre possessions. As with the Russians on the other side of the country, alcohol tended to amplify the dangers: ‘The Americans found large supplies of Rhine wine which had been kept for years in the cellars . . . they were dreadfully drunk.’ Later Elena confirmed that the Americans had ‘emptied all the cellars’ as they passed through.
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Before they left, a friendly American doctor brought the Russian women ‘cotton-like’ bread that proved - to their evident surprise - ‘completely edible’.
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Koblenz and its environs were picked over by a number of nations before the area settled down to being French. First the Russians came up from the local camp and tried to throttle the factory manager. They then smashed anything they could find. In June the area was occupied by Belgian troops. On 2 July worried Germans declared ‘with horror that we would be occupied by the French’.
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Carl Zuckmayer was a Rhinelander by birth. He had fled Germany after the Nazis burned his books and became an American citizen in 1939. The sight of the burned-out shell
^z
of his parents’ house in the cathedral city of Mainz brought home the scale of the destruction and made him aware of the enormity of the task ahead. Germany was still full of contrasts: ‘From the vision of the destroyed Badger-house
^aa
to the completely unchanged farmhouse parlour in the Weismühl, from Heidelberg to the German Theatre, from the town park in Schöneberg to the Riemergasse, from the first night in Zurich to the morning celebrations in Vienna, from the outrages and obscenities with our “Intelligence” and so forth - how can a heart bear it.’
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Zuckmayer listened to the German soul among the ruins that winter. He went to Frankfurt-am-Main and gazed at the remains of the Römerberg, the medieval core of the city. A woman caught him gaping in astonishment at the extent of the damage and said in a dialect he had known from childhood: ‘Yes, that’s what we wanted all right, and that’s what we got.’
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Karl-Heinz Bohrer was ten when the Americans arrived in the village where he was living in his grandparents’ holiday home near Remagen Bridge. The Wehrmacht had famously failed to blow up the bridge, and the Americans were able to form an impressive bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Rhine before the structure collapsed. Young German boys had been taught that the Americans were cowards, who fought wars by dropping bombs. Karl-Heinz had seen the disembowelled body of a black airman in the snow. The Americans took him prisoner briefly, because he was wearing a steel helmet to take some milk over a dangerous meadow. The village was searched for arms. Meanwhile the old men and young boys were lined up against a wall with their hands up. Karl-Heinz did not find the experience frightening, but rather exhilarating. The first indication that peace had come was the silence. The war had gone elsewhere, across the Rhine, towards the centre of Germany. Where he was, it was over.