Authors: Roger Moorhouse
ever-increasing momentum’. The question of who was going to win
the war, he believed, had now been answered: ‘the collapse of Germany
[is] regarded as inevitable’.41
In the circumstances, Berliners resorted to the sort of dark, wry
humour for which they are famous. It was in evidence most often in
the whispered jokes and quips that increasingly punctuated ordinary
conversation in the city. It was not usually the cause of belly laughs –
life was too grim for that – rather it would result perhaps in a half-smile,
or a shake of the head. Many jokes centred on the leading figures of
the Third Reich: Goebbels and Göring were the two most common
targets for caricature. The voracious sexual appetite of the former was
one popular subject, and it was quipped that the angel atop Berlin’s
350
berlin at war
Victory Column was the only virgin left in the city, as she was the only
woman beyond the diminutive Propaganda Minister’s reach. Göring,
meanwhile, earned himself ridicule for a number of reasons – not least
his own ‘larger-than-life’ character and his legendary vanity – but most
pertinently for his proclamation, early in the war, that he would change
his name to Meyer if the enemy ever penetrated German air space.
Accordingly, in the height of the air war, the capital’s air raid sirens
were popularly known as ‘Meyer’s Bugle’.42
The Nazi mania for abbreviations was also a natural target for
humour. The ‘German Girls’ League’, for instance, which was abbre-
viated as the BdM (for
Bund deutscher Mädel
) was often rendered
as the
Bund deutscher Matratzen
(German Mattresses’ League), or as
Bedarfsartikel deutscher Männer
(Commodities for German men). Painted
on many walls in the German capital, the initials LSR indicated the
location of the nearest air raid shelter, or
Luftschutzraum
. Towards the end of the war, however, LSR was popularly taken to mean
Lernt schnell
russisch
– or ‘Learn Russian quickly’.43
As this last example demonstrates, humour easily crossed over into
subversion, especially as the fortunes of war turned against Germany.
Towards the end of 1944 and early in 1945, dissent was increasingly
expressed via graffiti, often scrawled on Nazi propaganda posters. One
example involved the so-called
Schattenmann
, or ‘shadow man’, a life-
size silhouette of a figure with a hat, which was officially painted on
walls, often with the motto
Feind hört mit
– ‘The enemy is listening’
– to remind Germans to exercise caution and discretion in their conver-
sations. In Berlin, however, as the war neared its end, the
Schattenmann
was often given the subversive title
Adolf türmt
– or ‘Adolf scarpers’
– thereby expressing the hope that the Führer himself would soon be
on his way. And, as if the mysterious figure in a hat did not do enough
to suggest a departure on a long journey, the
Schattenmann
was some-
times given a suitcase.44
By that late stage of the war, there were many in Berlin who would
have welcomed the chance to ‘scarper’ themselves. Yet, the ties of
family, community and work bound tightly for most, quite apart from
the restrictions imposed by a regime keen to know precisely where
its citizens were and what they were doing. Then, in October 1944, a
new responsibility was foisted upon them.
All those males between the ages of sixteen and sixty, who were
to unreason and beyond
351
not already in military service, were to be conscripted into a newly
formed ‘National Militia’ – the
Volkssturm
. The idea of the
Volkssturm
already had a long pedigree by the winter of 1944, having been inspired
by the Prussian
levée en masse
of the end of the Napoleonic Wars and
mooted in the last desperate months of the First World War. Now,
with the Red Army encroaching on the eastern frontier of the Reich,
and the western Allies poised at Aachen in the west, Hitler ordered
the creation of this new force, whose determined defence of their
own home towns, he expected, would turn the tide of the war.
For all the rhetoric, the
Volkssturm
was scarcely an impressive force.
The Nazis had been so efficient in conscripting menfolk for military
service that, with the exception of those of military age who were
released from professions that were now deemed expendable, all that
was left to recruiting officers were youths, old men and invalids. It
was a fact not lost on ordinary civilians, who quipped, in a parody of
the popular song, ‘
Die Wacht am Rhein
’:
Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein
Der Führer zieht die Opas ein.
Dear Fatherland, set your mind at rest,
The Führer has called the Grandpas up.
One potentially rich source of recruits was the legions of injured
soldiers, recuperating in the hospitals of the Reich, and party agen-
cies duly patrolled the wards, looking for anyone who was still fit
enough to hold a gun and could be pressed back into service. Peter
Siewert was one of the lucky ones. He had already been seriously
wounded serving with the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine in the summer
of 1943 and was recovering after a series of operations in a Berlin clinic.
When his nurse suggested that he start picking at his injuries that
winter, he immediately grasped the reason. By the time the
Volkssturm
recruiting sergeant arrived the following week, Peter’s wounds were
suppurating nicely, and, while much of his ward was marched off to
fight again, he was deemed unfit for further service.45
Others employed rather less painful methods, feigning illness or
procuring fraudulent doctor’s notes. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich recalled her
partner Leo Borchard visiting a doctor acquaintance in November 1944.
352
berlin at war
‘“I think it’s about time for you to be preparing for the Home Guard”,
the doctor told him. “Better to have things ready in good time, and then
when the moment comes they won’t look too new.”’ Borchard duly
picked up ‘a predated weak heart and alarmingly high blood pressure’,
which, in due course, would excuse him service in the
Volkssturm
.46
It was not necessarily cowardice that made people go to such lengths
to avoid service in the
Volkssturm
; neither should such behaviour be
glibly equated with opposition to the Nazi regime. Rather, there were
a number of quite understandable reasons why many Berliners sought
to avoid the call-up. For one thing, many were already buckling under
the strain of the war, and resented having to shoulder new responsi-
bilities. For another, it was widely suspected at the time that the Soviets
would not treat
Volkssturm
men as legitimate combatants, and that
they risked being executed as spies or partisans, if captured.47
Nonetheless, many did as they were ordered and duly turned out
for the Berlin
Volkssturm
. After taking an oath and attending a rather
perfunctory four-day training period, they were provided with a simple
armband, reading
Deutscher Volkssturm
, and allocated to their local
battalion for further instruction. There were no formal uniforms, just
the order that bright-coloured clothing was inadvisable and that items
should be dyed
einsatzbraun
, or ‘field-service brown’. Indeed, the
opening month of 1945 would see a nation-wide initiative to collect
clothing for the
Volkssturm
, donated by members of the public. The
result was that those men who turned out in uniform at all usually
wore a bizarre mixture of components, with Luftwaffe tunics being
paired with Hitler Youth caps or Wehrmacht overcoats.48
The training was also rather haphazard. If they were lucky, recruits
might undertake courses in map reading, tactics and fortification, but
many of them did nothing beyond the four-day induction. They might
also receive weapons. The standard-issue item for the
Volkssturm
was
the
Panzerfaust
single-shot, disposable bazooka, which was cheaply
produced and became the staple of the German defence against Soviet
tanks. Yet in practice,
Volkssturm
men were issued with whatever weapons were available, including obsolete rifles and captured foreign weaponry.
The alternative was that they would receive nothing at all.
In November 1944 a mass oath-taking for new recruits was staged
in Berlin, timed to coincide with the commemoration of the Beer
Hall Putsch, a sacred date in the Nazi calendar. The main event was
to unreason and beyond
353
held in the Wilhelmplatz, where many thousands of
Volkssturm
men
gathered in the rain. Similar ceremonies were held at ten other loca-
tions across the city with the speeches relayed by loudspeaker. In all,
over 100,000 Berliners took the
Volkssturm
oath that day:
I swear before God this sacred oath,
that I will be unconditionally loyal and obedient
to the Führer of the Greater German Reich, Adolf Hitler.
I swear that I will fight bravely for my homeland,
and that I would rather die than surrender
the freedom and the future of my people.49
Thereafter, Goebbels gave a short speech from the balcony of the
Propaganda Ministry, in which he reminded the new recruits of their
oath, spoke of their ‘determination to fight’ and their ‘unshakeable
will never to surrender to the enemies of the Reich’. Writing his diary
that evening, he was predictably upbeat, noting that the new force
‘made an excellent impression’. Clearly mindful of the criticisms that
were already circulating, he concluded that it was wrong to view them
as ‘a levy of old men and children’.50
Few would have agreed with this assessment. The oath-taking in
Berlin was certainly well attended, but it can have done little to improve
the public mood. Though the creation of the
Volkssturm
was intended
to demonstrate the determination of ordinary Germans to defend
their home towns and cities against their enemies, in practice it smacked
of desperation. The
Volkssturm
men, newly sworn in, marched in the
drizzle along Unter den Linden and beneath the Brandenburg Gate,
like the proud and victorious armies of the past. Yet with their greying
hair, their assorted raincoats, flat caps and fedoras, and with a plethora
of captured and obsolete weapons across their shoulders, they could
scarcely have looked less like soldiers.
On the evening of 30 January 1945, a prestigious film premiere was
held in the UFA cinema on Alexanderplatz. It was an auspicious day:
the twelfth anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power had been chosen
as the date for the presentation of Goebbels’ newest propaganda spec-
tacular – the film
Kolberg
.
Telling the story of the defence of a small German town during
354
berlin at war
the Napoleonic Wars,
Kolberg
was a monumental undertaking.
Produced in glorious Agfacolour, it was a feast for the eyes, with
battle scenes of hitherto unrivalled grandeur and scale and the rather
unusual feature of having its French characters speak French. Begun
in 1943, it was the most expensive film of the Nazi era, costing an
estimated 80.5 million Reichsmarks, about eight times that of most
contemporary films. Six thousand horses were employed, as well as
a hundred railway wagons full of salt, for use as snow in the winter
scenes.51 The film’s director, Veit Harlan, claimed in his memoirs
that 187,000 soldiers were drafted in to feature in the film’s military
scenes – more than had fought in the original battle. Though this
claim must be treated with some scepticism, it is nonetheless clear
that Harlan and Goebbels planned to ‘create the biggest movie of
all time’.52
The reason for this enormous outlay and expense – all during the
most critical phase of the war and in a time of dire shortages on the
home front – was obvious. Goebbels believed that
Kolberg
, with its
messages about honourable sacrifice and the inspirational power of
popular resistance against the invader, was of critical importance in
galvanising Germany’s civilians for the coming struggle against their
enemies. He deemed it so important that he even wrote many of the
set-piece speeches himself. The result, he immodestly confided in his
dairy, was ‘a true masterpiece . . . [which] is as important for the mood
of the German people as a victorious battle’.53
Kolberg
told the story of the Pomeranian town of the same name,
which had been besieged by the French in 1807. Aside from the oblig-
atory ‘love interest’, insisted on by Goebbels and played by Kristina
Söderbaum, the main protagonists of the film were the town’s mayor