After the Reich (19 page)

Mecklenburg

Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg’s sister Tisa was also liberated by the Americans. She was living in the large manor of her first husband in Mecklenburg together with 120 refugees. The German army wanted the house too, to billet soldiers retreating from the Russian advance. For days it was touch and go whether their liberators would be American or Russian. Then six American jeeps appeared: ‘we were free’.
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Free, but not without worries. ‘Waves of liberated P.O.W. and Polish workers swept over the countryside. They broke into farms and country houses, looted, beat the proprietors and chased them away.’
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The Russian Zone began only five miles away. ‘Sometimes they paid us short visits, robbing and plundering on the way.’
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If the Poles and Russians were not enough, Tisa was threatened by the Germans who remained on the estate, who found her fraternising with former French forced labourers disgraceful.
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Americans ran across the transit camp at Woebbelin near the grand-ducal palace of Ludwigslust. Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Russians and western Europeans had all ended up there after being moved out of their original camps. No one had fed them and there were cases of cannibalism. The soldiers can hardly have helped them much by giving them sweets, but the thought was there. The American commander pursued the usual policy of making the townsfolk responsible. All inhabitants of Ludwigslust over ten had to come and view the dead. Photographs show trenches filled with corpses stretching far and wide before the gates of the Schloss.
¹⁷⁴

The Americans made way for the British. Very soon Tisa began to hear rumours that the zones were to be adjusted, and that the Russians would be taking over her part of Mecklenburg. Once she heard confirmation of the story she hitched up a caravan - a former army signals wagon - and prepared to flee. One day she had a visit from a Polish officer who arrived brandishing roses. He wanted to thank her for the way she had treated Poles and other prisoners. ‘But get out! The Russians are coming here.’
¹⁷⁵
She needed no more prompting. As soon as she had received the appropriate papers, she drove her caravan to Lübeck in the British Zone.

Eastern Mecklenburg had been captured by the Russians. In Carwitz and Feldberg, where the family of the writer Rudolf Ditzen (Hans Fallada) were living, the
Honoratioren
- the town’s elite - committed suicide. The chemist killed his children first. There were rapes, and Ditzen’s estranged wife Suse was not exempted.
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In September Ursula von Kardorff finally traced her mother Ina, who had last been heard of on her estate at Böhlendorf in Mecklenburg. She arrived in Berlin, with the usual tale to tell. She and her husband, the painter Konrad von Kardorff, were old, and were not prepared to run from the Russian advance. Konrad expired in March, and was saved from the bitter experience of the rest of his family. They had lived modestly, slaughtered few animals and drunk little from the collection of wine in the cellar, and despised all those who cut and ran.

Even when Stettin fell, the Kardorffs stayed put. They hoped that it would be the English that conquered them: ‘gentlemanly types, and sort of cousins’. Long lines of refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania passed the gates and, despite the implorings of relations, they would not budge. Then one May morning the Cossacks appeared on the horizon: ‘they came en masse, with tanks, on motorbikes, on foot, on horseback, even on sleighs drawn by teams of four dogs’. They fell on the wine cellar, so prudently preserved; then the destruction began, of furniture and pictures. Aunt May and Uncle Willi committed suicide. As May put it to Ina, ‘The Kardorffs have been at home here for five hundred years, what could we do elsewhere? I think God will have mercy on us.’ Ursula’s uncle Egon, former commander of a cavalry regiment, saw the bodies in the wood and went to Ina: ‘Now I will have to leave you alone. I can’t bear a life like this, and I have no fear of death.’ He went to his parents’ grave in the wood, where Ursula’s father was also buried, and took poison.

Ursula’s mother was now on her own. She packed some things in a rucksack and walked. In the local villages the same scene repeated itself: drunken soldiers, dead nobles. A woman had shot fifteen members of her family single-handed then drowned herself. Ina von Kardorff was robbed of her watch and her last possessions. In a small town she was given lodging by some artisans and a pastor’s wife until she was ordered to leave again.

She arrived in Güstrow, and found an attic room with a baker’s wife. She painted pictures and gave drawing lessons, sewed and embroidered. She even helped a painter do a portrait of Stalin. All around her were the sick and dying, and disease. At night houses were searched and she heard the screams of women, followed by shots. In the church on Sundays the pastor announced long lists of the dead. She spoke to Ursula of Russians, too, some of whom were good and generous, and gave things to the people. Some even went to church.
¹⁷⁷

Werewolves

Underground resistance to the occupation either petered out quickly or failed to materialise at all. The Werewolves, who had been formed in October 1944 to make life impossible for the Allies, committed the odd dastardly deed such as the murder of the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff, carried out by two men dressed as paratroopers in March 1945. After that, they fizzled out. The killing of Oppenhof remains controversial: Goebbels was naturally pleased, and described the men as partisans, but his lack of prior knowledge would suggest that the mayor was not killed by direct orders from Berlin. Others have stated that he was killed as a
rendement de compte
of mere local significance.
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It might instead have been the work of an SS hit-squad rather than Werewolves. In Austria, Franz Fehrer had been given the job of training Werewolves in Wiener Neustadt, but as foreign troops crossed Austria’s borders the Gauleiter, Eigruber, gave orders to discontinue the training and not to attack the American forces. The American OSS came to the conclusion that there were no more active cells of Werewolves in Austria in July 1945.
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Carl Zuckmayer claimed that the spirit of the Werewolves collapsed at the same time as Germany, and not a trace remained. Certainly Lucius Clay could find no trace of anyone trying to form a ‘Nazi underground’ in early July 1945.
¹⁸⁰

There were, however, some very isolated incidents. In Glowitz in Pomerania a forester called Drambusch, a fanatical Nazi, withdrew to the forest where he built himself a bothy and planned to recruit others in his fight against the conquerors. No one listened and later the Russians tracked him down and shot him. He died of his wounds soon after in Stolp.
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Goebbels had made a loud noise about German resistance and there was still a jittery feeling about Werewolves in May, which the Russians used as an excuse to slaughter any young men they found. The Czechs were even less kind than the Russians. Dr E. Siegel heard about the arrival in the Little Fortress of Theresienstadt (now Terezin in the Czech Republic) of twenty-one men branded Werewolves. They were stood against the wall. During the night the doctor heard the usual screams and cracking of whips. Later he heard that prisoners had cleared the gatehouse of blood, brains, teeth and hair and had to scatter fresh sand. The men were officially listed as ‘dead on arrival’.
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Accusing someone of being a Werewolf could seal his or her fate, and there must have been many cases where individuals sought revenge in this way. In Dalliendorf in Mecklenburg in the SBZ (the Soviet Zone, or Sowjetische Besatzungszone), twenty-six-year-old Paul Schröder had emerged from concentration camp wearing the green triangle of a criminal, but he quickly converted his record to make out that he was a former member of the Communist Party. He told the authorities that a Frau Westphal, the owner of an estate in the village, together with two men called Holst and Redicke, were Werewolves. All three were shot on 2 July 1945. When it transpired that Schröder had been lying, he too was shot.
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There was a little bravado at the beginning when battle-hardened soldiers observed the punier members of the Allied armies and imagined how easy it might be to overpower them.
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In general, however, the Allied soldiers were more a danger to themselves, as the writer James Stern, an Englishman in an American uniform, discovered when he chanced on an American cemetery on the way home from Bamberg to Nuremberg in the summer of 1945. The war had been over for two months, but the caretaker told him that bodies came in at an average of thirteen a day. Stern was incredulous, but it seemed that drunken and reckless driving was the chief cause, together with suicide.
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Illustrious Bones

The arrival of the Allies, the Red Army in particular, had initiated a series of bizarre journeys - bones were shifted from ancient vaults to escape desecration. The first to go were of comparatively recent date: those of Hindenburg and his wife, who had been laid to rest in the Tannenberg Monument in 1934.
^al
The retreating German army exhumed Hindenburg’s corpse in January 1945 and blew up the monument before they left. The corpses were conveyed across the Baltic on the cruiser
Emden
.

Once landed, the Hindenburgs’ remains were driven to Potsdam, and stored in Luftwaffe HQ Kurfürst in Wildpark near by. They joined the royal refugees that had been extracted from the vault under the Garrison Church: Frederick the Great and his austere father, Frederick William I, who had been taken from the crypt by candlelight one night in February. At the same time Wehrmacht officers had removed all the captured standards. The Garrison Church was destroyed on 14 April 1945, and the bodies escaped the bombing and subsequent firestorm as a result.
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By the time of the Allied raid, the Hindenburgs, Frederick William and Frederick had already left Potsdam.
^am
On Sunday 11 March Hauptmann Wilfried Seegebarth received orders to take them to a salt mine in Thuringia along with the standards and other precious objects associated with Prussia’s most famous son: musical instruments, tapestries and Frederick the Great’s library. In the late afternoon of the 13th, the transport had reached Bernterode in Thuringia. The coffins were lodged in the mine and concealed behind blocks of salt. All those involved were sworn to secrecy.

American soldiers reached the mine on 27 April and found the coffins. When they left Thuringia in keeping with the decisions taken at Yalta and in preparation for the meeting at Potsdam, they carried the dead bodies off with them. They took them to the university city of Marburg where they were initially housed in the cellar of the Schloss, before being brought to the basement of the city archive.

On 21 August 1946 the royal bodies were secretly reburied in the St Elisabeth’s Church in the city. A few days later they were joined by the Hindenburgs. The pastor agreed to lodge the bodies under pressure from the Americans and Oskar von Hindenburg, the president’s son, who had commanded POW camps during the war and had been arraigned as a war criminal. He was let off with a fine.
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The royal bodies were finally walled up in the church on the 21st, in the presence of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia - the crown prince’s eldest surviving son - and his wife, Princess Kira.
^an
Somewhere along the way an act of petty larceny had been carried out against the person of Frederick the Great: his Order of the Black Eagle had been pilfered, probably by an American soldier. You could still see where it had been by the star-shaped patch of pure Prussian blue on his otherwise faded uniform tunic.
^ao

3

Berlin

When I rode through the area around the Tiergarten yesterday, I thought to myself: one day they will talk of May 1945 in the same way as they describe the Sack of Rome. Naturally, it was different to 1527, because Berlin was already half finished, but had it not been for the lunacy of the defence it would not have been so much of a battlefield. It was only when we now see what the Russians are taking away that we can see how fundamentally rich we were.

Margret Boveri, Tage des Überlebens, Frankfurt/Main 1996, 140-1

T
here was no shortage of bones in Berlin on 2 May 1945 when General Weidling signed the ceasefire in that city. The Russians had finished the business a day late: they had hoped to have defeated the Germans by - if not on - May Day;
¹
but still, the enemy was soundly thrashed. Of the 150,000 homes in the centre of the city, only 18,000 were undamaged, and 32,000 were completely destroyed. After Goebbels had incited Berliners to fight to the last, his deputy Fritzsche told them to stop: 134,000 soldiers laid down their arms.
²
Ruth Friedrich, who had been a member of a low-key resistance group, thought the Third Reich had vanished like a ghost. She exulted in the deaths of Hitler and Goebbels: ‘Go to hell, Führer and Reich Chancellor!
Tempi passati!
You don’t interest us any more.’
³