Berlin at War (43 page)

tryside, to performing the year of
Reichsarbeitsdienst
, or ‘Reich Labour Service’. For many Berliners, the war was thus passed in a succession

of ‘camps’, as they shifted from one ‘action’, or ‘service’, to the next,

and were shunted around the German countryside. Werner Lenz, who

was twelve in 1939, spent much of the war away from his Berlin home.

After an initial stay in a KLV camp near Trautenau in Bohemia in the

winter of 1941–2, he was subsequently sent on a number of extended

harvest ‘actions’ in Pomerania and Silesia, before finally serving his period

of
Arbeitsdienst
in rural Mecklenburg. In all, he was away from the capital for some two and a half years of the war.55

All of this can be interpreted as part and parcel of the totalitarian

system and an example of the mobilisation of every sector of society,

in which the Nazi regime specialised. It is also easy to see how such

programmes fitted neatly with the regime’s ideological goals. By

removing young people from their parents and homes for long periods

of time, such programmes served increasingly as exercises in mass

indoctrination. It was this aspect that was responsible for the falling

popularity of the KLV programme, despite the increasing threat of

air attack. After reaching a peak in that first wave in 1940–41, partici-

pation in the capital dropped off rapidly, falling to around 50,000 in

November 1941 and remaining at this level for most of the next year.

In 1943 a renewed impetus was given to the programme by the esca-

lation in the air war and the resultant decision to close the capital’s

schools and carry out a partial evacuation. In sharp contrast to many

other urban areas of the Reich, Berlin remained stubbornly resistant

an evil cradling

201

to the KLV programme. Of the 260,000 eligible children in the German

capital, only 40,000 participated; most others were evacuated privately

to family or friends in rural districts, and around 80,000 children

remained in the city. 56 Even at a time when the German capital was

receiving its most serious air raids, therefore, a majority of Berliners

continued to shun the state-sponsored evacuation, preferring to make

their own arrangements. However successful it might have been as

an experiment in mass indoctrination, the KLV had clearly failed as

an air defence measure. As one of those who experienced it concluded,

it was ‘a farce’.57

Few of those Berlin children and youths who left the Anhalter Station

would return the same boys and girls. For all of them, the KLV evacu-

ation would be one of the most formative experiences of their young

lives.

Just as those young passengers had undergone tremendous changes,

so too had the city to which they were returning. Christa Becker had

spent most of 1941 with her family in rural Pomerania, and upon her

return to the capital that autumn it didn’t take long for her and

her family to notice the impact of the air raids:

‘Zorn’s Ice Cream Parlor is gone’, that was the first thing Peter noticed

when we were above ground. In the opposite direction the chimney

with the toilet still stood amidst the rubble at Germania Palast. ‘Oh

my God,’ Tante Lenchen and my mother cried out like on cue, ‘Leiser’s

Shoe Store is gone and Bleile Textilien, oh God, oh God.’ [. . .] They

looked up steep climbing Samariter Strasse to see what else was missing.

People went about their business as if nothing had happened. It was

September 1941. We had been gone eight months, but it seemed much

longer.58

The German capital had become, as one returning KLV evacuee

recalled, a ‘horror city’.59

The Anhalter Station, too, was showing signs of considerable damage;

the glass arc of its roof was already disfigured with holes from incen-

diaries and its elegant frontage was sandbagged. In late November 1943,

it was so seriously damaged that only local traffic could use the station,

and all long-distance trains were redirected to the Silesian Station, or to

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berlin at war

Potsdam.60 After subsequent air attacks, large sections of the roof

collapsed, or had to be dismantled. From the autumn of 1944 onwards,

rail traffic began to fall away altogether, hampered not only by such

structural concerns, but also by wider systemic factors, such as logis-

tical difficulties and the availability of rolling stock.

Where it once proclaimed the grandeur, opulence and confidence

of the city that it served, the Anhalter Station was now symbolic of

the destruction and dislocation that had become commonplace in

Hitler’s capital. Passengers on its platforms now found themselves

waiting in the open air, the once vast structure above them reduced

to a few rickety spans of rusting metal and fractured glass. Christabel

Bielenberg passed through the station in the winter of 1944. It was a

sobering experience:

propaganda posters hung unnoticed in red and black tatters from the

shrapnel-pitted walls . . . Every day the windowless trains trundled in

and out in the few hours left for living between the American mass

daylight raids and the sporadic British night attacks; they carried a

rudderless crowd of soldiers, civilians, refugees and evacuees along

diverse routes to uncertain destinations.61

The fate of the Anhalter Station was finally sealed in February 1945,

when a daylight raid by the US Air Force wrought havoc in the heart

of the city. The Anhalter’s platforms were so pitted with craters, and

its iron girders so buckled by the heat of countless incendiaries, that

the station was considered to be beyond repair and rail traffic was

finally suspended. Its cavernous remains would later be demolished,

leaving only a small, jagged section of its once elaborate frontage to

mark the building through which so many Berliners had travelled to

distant parts.

10

The People’s Friend

Nazism was in many ways a very modern creed. In the political sphere,

the Nazis appeared to offer the country a new alternative; a bright

future, far removed from the old, moribund regime that had preceded

them. But their embrace of the modern was also evident elsewhere.

The building of the motorways in the 1930s, for instance, was an exer-

cise in deficit financing and Keynesian economics, but it was just as

much an attempt to harness an emerging technology: the motor car.

Though an impassioned hater of much of the artistic avant-garde,

Hitler was keen to embrace some aspects of modernity. During the

election campaigns prior to 1933 he had travelled the length and

breadth of the country by plane. This radical approach not only served

to associate Hitler in the public mind with all the glamour and novel

appeal of air travel, it also had the practical benefit that he could

reach a large proportion of his electorate, in three or four speaking

engagements each day.

The aspect of Nazi Germany that is associated most closely with

the ‘modern’ is its use of radio. From its infancy in the early 1920s,

when the first radio stations emerged to utilise the new technology,

radio spread swiftly and gained in popularity throughout the world.

But its growth – and political exploitation – in Germany was perhaps

the most spectacular of all.

The early development of radio in Germany was synonymous with

the town of Königs Wusterhausen, barely twenty miles from the heart

of Berlin. There, a primitive radio transmitter was established by the

German military during the First World War, which was later adapted

for civilian use. Its first transmission – a Christmas concert – was

broadcast on 22 December 1920 from a makeshift studio and, strangely,

the German public was forbidden to tune in.

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berlin at war

From this rather inauspicious beginning, the site at Königs

Wusterhausen, known as the
Funkerberg
, expanded swiftly. Within a

few years, it boasted a main broadcast tower of 243 metres, as well as

twelve smaller masts. At its heart were three buildings containing

studios, technical installations and an enormous, purpose-built diesel

generator, whose 660-litre capacity produced over 1,000 horsepower.

With the addition of a new site at nearby Zeesen in 1927, the complex

became one of the most advanced radio broadcast facilities in the

world.

From here, the
Deutschlandsender
transmitted on long wave all

over Germany. In addition, there were regional stations established

across the country – from Königsberg to Stuttgart, and Hamburg to

Munich – which not only relayed the signal of the
Deutschlandsender
,

but also broadcast material with a more local focus. For those living

in Berlin, the local station was
Funk-Stunde Berlin
, broadcasting from

the ‘Vox-Haus’ in the Tiergarten.

In its early phase, German radio was avowedly apolitical, with polit-

ical content being expressly banned. By the late 1920s, political content

began to emerge, especially under Brüning’s chancellorship from 1930

to 1932. Under his successor, Franz von Papen, this trend accelerated,

and radio became virtually the mouthpiece of the state. The only

problem was that few Germans seemed to be listening.

The politicisation of radio would reach its apogee after Hitler’s rise

to power. While they certainly did not invent the technology, the Nazis

could well be said to have perfected the use of radio as a political

medium. Under the expert guidance of Joseph Goebbels, they would

become the greatest exploiters of the political potential of the airwaves.

This was achieved not only through the simple application of propa-

ganda, but also by using the immediacy and involvement offered by

radio: taking advantage of its unique ability both to penetrate the

home and to make the listener feel a part of the programme. In 1933,

shortly after the Nazis came to power, Goebbels described radio as

‘the eighth Great Power’ and ‘the most influential and important

intermediary’ between the Nazi movement and the German people.

Hitler’s revolution, he said, ‘would have been impossible’ without radio.1

In the years that followed, radio was transformed from a medium that

catered largely for a minority audience to an all-embracing method of

mass communication. It became the regime’s primary tool in transmitting

the people’s friend

205

its message to the people, while the people in turn utilised it as their

primary source of entertainment and information. The expansion of

radio listenership – in line with the maxim ‘radio must reach all or it

will reach none’2 – was to be achieved in a number of ways.

The first step was to equip the populace with receivers.

Technological advances and improvements in infrastructure meant

that reception coverage in Germany was progressively increased

throughout the 1930s. But the real advance was achieved through the

marketing of affordable receivers, which brought the dream of a radio

in every home nearer to reality. Early in 1933, the Nazis decided to

subsidise the production of a radio set aimed specifically at those

Germans who had not traditionally been able to afford what was still

considered a luxury item. The result was the
Volksempfänger
, or ‘People’s Receiver’. A simple, three-valve, two-band receiver in a Bakelite cabinet,

the
Volksempfänger
sold for ‘just’ 76 Marks, around half the price of

the traditional radio set, and roughly equivalent to two weeks’ wages

for the average German worker.

A roaring success, more than seven million of these simple radios

were sold in the following six years. Their connection to the regime

was unmistakeable: even the radio’s model number – VE 301 – was a

reference to the date of Hitler’s seizure of power on 30 January. A

popular poster of the time showed the radio set superimposed over

a crowd scene, with the legend ‘All Germany hears the Führer via the

Volksempfänger
’. Another popular image was that of radio-listening as

a family occasion, showing a typical German family – father reading

the newspaper, mother knitting, children smiling happily – all grouped

around a radio set.

In 1938, the
Deutscher Klein Empfänger
(‘German Small Receiver’), or

DKE, was produced. About two-thirds the size of a
Volksempfänger
,

with only two valves and a low-powered receiver, it was marketed for

only 35 Marks. It was the cheapest radio set then available anywhere

in the world. Fairly crude and primitive, the DKE was nonetheless

adequate for receiving strong local signals. Its vital role in the govern-

ment’s ongoing propaganda campaign was acknowledged by its

popular nickname, the
Goebbels Schnauze
– ‘Goebbels’ gob’.

The propaganda aspect of radio was of crucial importance to the

Nazis. Indeed, Hitler made a point of speaking live on radio only two

days after his appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Thereafter, German