Authors: Roger Moorhouse
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into the yard to bury him. When she did not return, however, the
others in the cellar went to look for her. They found her, in her flat,
hanging in the bathroom.59
Most suicides, were motivated not by grief but by fear of a future
under Soviet rule.60 So effectively had Nazi propaganda spread the
image of the ‘Bolshevik barbarian’ that many Berliners preferred not
to find out whether the stories were true. The urge to take one’s own
life appears to have been particularly keenly felt in the German capital,
not least because Berlin was the primary target of the Nazis’ looming
nemesis, the Soviet army, and it was there that the Soviets were
expected to take their revenge. In the capital, therefore, there were a
number of very tangible encouragements to Berliners to take their
own lives. Hitler famously gave cyanide capsules to his staff.61
Elsewhere, the capital’s health authority distributed cyanide on request,
while the Hitler Youth handed poison capsules out at a concert of the
Berlin Philharmonic.62 According to the SS’s own internal reports,
suicide had become the single most discussed subject in the city:
Many are getting used to the idea of making an end of it. The
demand for poison, a pistol, or other means of ending a life is great
everywhere. Suicide out of genuine desperation over the catastrophe
that is undoubtedly to come is now on the agenda. Countless conver-
sations with relatives, friends and acquaintances are dominated by
such plans.63
There were many not shy of putting those plans into action. Some
were high-ranking personnel who had good reason to fear capture
and retribution. Hitler’s SS doctor, Ernst-Robert Grawitz, had been
one of the prime movers in the development of the Holocaust and
in the medical experiments carried out on concentration camp inmates,
and so was rightly fearful of falling into Soviet hands. On 24 April, he
detonated two hand grenades beneath the table, as he sat down to
dinner with his wife and two children in his villa in Babelsberg.
The vast majority of suicides were of ordinary Berliners, plagued
by much more mundane concerns. Unable to face the coming battle,
Erna Massow threw herself from the fourth floor of a staircase in the
suburb of Smargendorf. Hanna von Beseler from Lichterfelde poisoned
her eight-year old daughter and then overdosed on sleeping pills, as
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she feared that her husband, absent at the front, would not be able
to protect her from the Russians.64 In late April 1945, sixteen-year-old
Lieselotte Grunauer noted in her diary that the district of
Friedrichshagen had already seen around a hundred suicides:
The pastor shot himself and his wife and daughter . . . Mrs H. shot her
two sons and herself and slit her daughter’s throat. . . . Our teacher,
Miss K. hanged herself; she was a Nazi. The local party leader S. shot
himself and Mrs N. took poison. It’s a blessing that there is no gas at
present, otherwise some more of us would have taken their own lives,
perhaps we would also have been dead.65
In April 1945 alone, nearly four thousand suicides were reported in the
capital.66 Countless more went unregistered.
As the encirclement and siege of Berlin progressed, the official system
of registering, collecting and burying dead bodies collapsed. As one
journalist noted: ‘Everywhere, one ran into handcarts or wheelbarrows
with corpses in them wrapped in paper, and the carts were being pushed
or pulled by the grieving families themselves.’67 Corpses would be buried
wherever space could be found; in cemeteries, certainly, but also in
parkland and in open patches of ground. ‘In the gardens and the parks’,
one Berliner wrote, ‘everywhere, [there] are graves with crosses:
“unknown
Volkssturm
man, fell on this and that date.”’68 In the absence
of coffins, the dead would often be wrapped simply in newspapers or
blankets, or even left to lie where they fell. ‘The stench was so terrible’,
one memoir recorded, ‘that people were fainting in the streets.’69
Burying the dead could be a difficult task, as one Berliner found
when he resolved to bury his neighbours, who had committed suicide.
‘They lay in the same room’, he wrote, ‘amongst bedclothes, laundry,
scattered crockery and junk. All three had been shot in the head;
terrible pool of blood. It was a dreadful job to get them out of there.’70
There were further difficulties, not least because any prolonged activity
outdoors ran the risk of attracting the attentions of the Red Army. In
one instance, four civilians fell victim to a mortar attack, while
attempting to bury a corpse from their cellar: ‘Three men were appar-
ently killed outright’, a witness wrote, ‘whilst a fourth, blown to the
ground by the blast, pulled himself up into a sitting position, looked
around in shock, and then fell over backwards. Dead.’71
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The sight of a dead body quickly became commonplace. One young
soldier was confronted with two corpses on a handcart after a fire had
broken out in a nearby cellar. ‘They were still burning’, he recalled, ‘their
faces were already half charred and their clothes had been reduced to
ash. I had never seen anything so gruesome.’ Yet he surprised himself
by his reaction: ‘The image did not affect me much, everything was as
though in a dream. One adapted oneself to the circumstances.’72
As the front line drew ever closer, Berliners also had to contend with
the dreadful din of warfare. Since Hitler’s birthday, the arrival of the
Red Army had been heralded by a low rumble of distant artillery, and
punctuated by aerial bombardments of growing intensity. However, as
the front line neared, those sounds were transformed into a veritable
cacophony of explosions, chattering machine guns and howling mortars.
Klaus Sommer was recuperating in a field hospital in Tempelhof:
I was woken by the thunder of cannon fire, which had been audible
in the distance for days but was now growing louder. It must have been
about 5 in the morning. Everyone else in the room was awake . . . and
it was clear to all of us that it was now deadly serious. We spoke only
quietly and sparingly. Close to the ward a German flak gun must have
been situated. It made an ear-splitting noise. Machine-gun and rifle fire
were added to the mix . . . The windows rattled. There was no chance
of getting back to sleep.73
One sound in particular struck terror into German hearts – that of
the Soviet
Katyusha
. Mounted on the back of army trucks, it was a
multiple rocket launcher, which was extremely effective at laying down
a devastating amount of explosives in a short space of time. Its trade-
mark howling wail, as its barrage was fired, caused it to be known to
the Germans as the
Stalinorgel
, or ‘Stalin’s Organ’. For many Berliners,
its fearsome howl alone was enough to convince them that the war
was lost. Dorit Erkner recalled that when one heard its awful din, ‘one
thought only about survival’.74 Describing a
Stalinorgel
attack, another reported: ‘nobody dared leave the cellar. The house shook from the
explosions, bricks and roof tiles fell, windowpanes flew out. It was as
though the entire house was falling apart, piece by piece.’75
As the front approached, many civilians came into close contact
with their own soldiers. Most instinctively gave help and shelter when
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it was needed, and – regardless of how much they wanted to keep
the battle and all its participants at arm’s length – provided whatever
succour to the soldiers they could. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich was most
accommodating when a young Wehrmacht soldier burst through her
front door in the midst of battle, swiftly providing him with civilian
clothes so that he could desert.76 It was not always an easy decision,
however. Gerda Langosch recalled the mixed emotions that resulted
from the arrival of four young soldiers in her cellar: ‘On the one hand,
we felt sorry for the poor lads’, she wrote, ‘but on the other we
couldn’t be too friendly to them, or else they would not leave and
would thereby put our own lives at risk. It was a terrible situation.’77
Soldiers of the SS could face a different reception. Identified as the
most ideologically committed Nazis and closely allied to the regime,
they struck fear into many and even provoked hostility. When Ruth
Andreas-Friedrich was confronted by SS troops, she found it hard to
hold her tongue:
‘Open up!’ comes a yell from outside. ‘Open up!’ . . .
The door flies open; I find myself staring into seven worn-out
soldiers’ faces.
‘What is it?’
‘Water!’ says one of them hoarsely. ‘Water!’ They wear the SS
emblems on their collars, the accursed runes of our mortal foes. They
look as if they would collapse at any moment.
‘We have no water,’ I say. The men look at me like whipped dogs.
‘Where’s the front?’
They look at the ground. ‘Along the canal. They’ve broken through.
Over on the Priesterweg, too.’
‘Well, then, be off with you.’
They make a hopeless gesture. ‘Where to?’ . . . We’ve lost our squad
leader. They’ll shoot us if we come without a leader.’
‘My heart bleeds for you!’
The youngest of them tosses his head defiantly. ‘Don’t rejoice too
soon. You people are the first that they will mash to a pulp.’
His neighbour nods . . . He gives me a hostile stare. ‘Watch your-
self, miss. Things haven’t gone as far as you think.’
I slam the door. But I don’t feel comfortable about it. Shouldn’t I
have given them a glass of water after all?78
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But the battle could not be kept at arm’s length for long: inevitably
the front line had to pass through. Huddled in their cellars, Berliners
often had no precise idea of the temporary hell that was erupting
outside, but they could certainly feel and hear it. Dorothea von
Schwanenflügel recalled her house being rocked so violently by a Soviet
barrage that ‘we feared that we would be buried alive like animals in
their holes’:
Roof tiles were flung all over . . . windows were shattered and cracks
appeared in the front brick wall. Shortly thereafter, we heard the chatter
of heavy machine gun fire . . . As the noise got closer, we could hear
explosions and rifle fire right in our immediate vicinity. We could even
hear the horrible guttural screaming of the Soviet soldiers . . . Shots
shattered our windows and shells exploded in our garden.79
Once the German soldiers had pulled out, the Soviets arrived. Most
contemporaries recalled very clearly the moment they first saw a Red
Army soldier. In some cases, it was only a glimpse, perhaps across the
street or from a distance, but the olive green uniform was unmistakable.
‘It was a terrifying sight’, wrote one eye witness, ‘as they sat high on
their tanks with their rifles cocked, aiming at the houses as they passed.
The screaming, gun-wielding women were the worst.’80 Many also
commented on their ‘otherness’. ‘Their faces make you scared’, one
Berliner wrote, ‘they are Asians, with slitted eyes, protruding cheekbones,
and greasy hair which sticks out beneath their forage caps.’81
Aside from the initial shock, for most the first encounter with Soviet
soldiers usually passed off uneventfully. The first echelon were primar -
ily interested in securing the area and ensuring that there were no
enemy soldiers concealed there. Later arrivals, however, tended to be
more demanding. ‘Around 8 this morning the first Russians entered
our house’, wrote Ernst Schmidt.
Questions at the point of a machine gun: ‘Uhr?’ [Watch], ‘Parabell?’
[Pistol], ‘German soldier here?’ After 10 minutes the next squad arrived.
Again the same questions, especially the threatening demand for
watches.
As the morning progressed, it started in earnest. One squad dragged
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the wine racks out of the cellar and smashed them open in front of
the house . . . So it goes on. One squad after the other. Always the same
demands for schnapps and watches.82
The passion of Soviet soldiers for watches became legendary. Many
of them would have a number of examples – men’s and women’s – up
their arms, which they would compare and admire with tremendous
enthusiasm. Like many other Germans in Berlin at that time, Hitler’s
pilot, Hans Baur, was also relieved of his watch. ‘For the first time’, he
recalled, ‘I heard the later-familiar utterance “Uri-Uri” . . . My aviator’s
watch, equipped with all the latest gadgetry, especially delighted [the
soldier]. It was decidedly superior to the other ten or twelve he had
already “found”. At least, one assumed this from the satisfied look on
his face.’83 Those who resisted could expect harsh treatment and phys-
ical assault; one woman in Friedenau was shot dead when she refused
to hand over her watch to a young Soviet soldier.84