Authors: Roger Moorhouse
civilians it could be disconcerting. One eyewitness recalled hearing the
shooting and falling into a blind panic, thinking that the fighting had
resumed, and packing a bag to escape the city.1 Yet despite the hubbub,
for most Berliners the uncertainty of the previous week eased and they
began once again to move about the remains of their city, in the search
for food or accommodation, with a little more confidence.
The scene that greeted them on those first excursions was one of
unimaginable destruction. Few areas of the capital were untouched
by the ravages of war. Entire districts had been rendered uninhabit-
able; buildings standing like so many broken teeth, with empty, gaping
window frames opening into blackened voids where once had been
apartments, homes and businesses. The streets in between were pitted
with craters and covered by vast fields of rubble, through which
makeshift footpaths snaked. Over it all, a pall of smoke and dust hung
in the air, covering everything, choking the survivors and twisting and
eddying in the cool spring breeze.
The detritus of war was everywhere. The city centre was the worst
affected, being peppered with destroyed military hardware: tanks, anti-
tank guns, trucks and vehicles of all types. The once-ornate gardens
of the Königsplatz in front of the Reichstag building had been trans-
formed into a battlefield, littered with artillery pieces, discarded
weapons and the dead of both sides. Elsewhere, it was little rosier.
epilogue: hope
383
On Chausseestrasse, close to Friedrichstrasse in the very heart of the
city, a half-track personnel carrier of the SS-
Nordland
Division stood
abandoned in the middle of the road. On either side lay the bodies
of its Swedish crew, gunned down presumably as they had emerged
from the vehicle to engage the Soviet infantry. In the rear door was
the crumpled body of the SS nurse who had been accompanying them.
Scenes such as these were replicated across the city. One eyewit-
ness recalled an area in the west of the capital, which was a chaos of
burnt-out vehicles and wrecked tanks. ‘A dead-tank park’, he wrote,
‘crowded with buckled, broken, twisted wreckage and black and grey
monsters of every kind, their caterpillar tracks sprawled out or looped
up or broken into chunks.’ It was, he said, like ‘some ghastly work-
shop where Vulcan had indulged a whim to play with mechanical toys,
until one day he became cross and in a fit of ungovernable rage smashed
them all’.2
As if to exacerbate the chaos, Berlin had been thoroughly looted.
From corner shops to department stores, few businesses had escaped
the frenzy of ‘liberation’, with waves of looters passing through the
city – Germans, foreign labourers and Soviets – like so many plagues
of locusts. Ordinary homes and cellars, too, were ruthlessly targeted,
with many German soldiers seeking civilian clothes so as to escape an
uncertain fate in Soviet captivity. Soviet soldiers joined in the fun,
showing themselves especially keen on women’s underwear and kitchen
taps. In the aftermath, the unwanted remains littered the streets, every-
thing from broken items of furniture to smashed trinkets. For Margret
Boveri, it was a thought-provoking sight: ‘Only with all that which the
Russians cart away, will we be able to judge how well-off we really
were. For the moment, one cannot really imagine how it will all be
tidied up, let alone how the houses will be rebuilt.’3 To the inhabitants
of Berlin, it must have seemed as though the city that they knew had
ceased to exist. Little wonder that they would refer to 1945 as
Stunde
Null
– ‘zero hour’.
For their part, the Soviets had swiftly established an administration in
the capital and had begun to restore order and distribute food. Margarethe
Kopen was delighted to discover that rations were being distributed again
in her district of Friedenau: ‘For Germans’, she wrote, ‘there was a daily
ration of 200 gr. of bread, 400 gr. of potatoes, 10 gr. of sugar, 3 gr. of
salt, 2 gr. of coffee and 25 gr. of meat.’ In addition, ‘there is talk of a
384
berlin at war
raised ration allocation and of an additional “gift” from Stalin, of coffee,
tea and pulses.’4 The Soviets also set up soup kitchens, distributing a
steaming concoction to a wary but hungry populace: ‘What could be
better?’ one diarist enthused. ‘It is a wonder brew from the land of milk
and honey. It tastes good and it fills your belly.’5 Such enthusiasm was a
rare commodity, however, as many Berliners – mindful of Nazi propa-
ganda – still feared starvation under Soviet rule. For this reason, many
still scoured the streets in that first week looking for any possible source
of additional nourishment. As one diarist recalled:
On the street-corner, I saw a woman with a large piece of meat and,
on asking where it had come from was told that there was horsemeat
nearby. I thought it was being handed out, so ran to find a still-warm
horse on the pavement surrounded by men and women with knives
and hatchets sawing off pieces of meat. So I pulled out my penknife,
wrestled myself a space and joined in.6
For all the difficulty that Berliners faced, however, it was nonethe-
less a relief to many to note that Soviet rule proved more benign in
that first week than had been feared. Seventeen-year-old Helmut Altner
was surprised by his treatment when he was caught by a Soviet patrol
trying to escape the capital with a group of refugees. Escorted back
towards the city, he fell behind the column:
We all have the same question inside us: ‘What now? Will we be killed
as we are told? Or do we have a short time before execution?’ Suddenly
one of the Russians stops and waits for me, as I am the last. ‘This is
the end!’ I slowly go up to him. Then he takes my arm. I am afraid
that he will take me aside somewhere where no one will see us, and
put an end to me, but then I notice that he is supporting me, walking
in step with me and guiding me. He gives me a cigarette and lights
one for himself. ‘War over! All go home!’ he says to me. I am aston-
ished. The immense tension of the last few days gives way inside me,
and I am suddenly unable to hold back the tears, tears of relief that
the enemy is human after all.7
The mood was still extremely tense, however. Women still had to fear
for their honour and men of military age feared arrest or worse. Soviet
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385
soldiers meanwhile roamed the city with apparent impunity. Ruth
Andreas-Friedrich described how Russian soldiers still turned up occa-
sionally at her home: ‘they go from room to room, look around,
pocket what they like. They are not unfriendly, but not friendly either.
They look through us, as though we are not there.’8 Some were more
confrontational. Jacob Kronika recalled a hostile stand-off between a
Berlin family and a Soviet commissar: ‘I am a Russian, a Communist
and a Jew’, the commissar began:
I have seen German crimes in my country with my own eyes. My father
and mother were murdered by the SS because they were Jews. My wife
and two children are missing. My home is in ruins. And what has
happened to me has happened to millions in Russia. Germany has
murdered, raped, plundered and destroyed . . . What do you think we
want to do, now that we have defeated German armies?
He then stared at a young boy, the eldest son of the family:
‘Stand up’, he ordered. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twelve’ answered the boy quietly
‘About as old as my son would be today. The SS criminals took him
from me.’
His hand slipped beneath his uniform. He pulled out his revolver
and pointed it at the boy . . .
With that, there was a commotion as the boy’s parents tried to reach
him, while others pleaded with the commissar that the boy was not
responsible for the crimes of the SS.
The tension was unbearable.
‘No, no, no, ladies and gentlemen, I will not shoot’, the commissar
continued. ‘But you must admit, I have enough reasons to do so. There
is so much that screams for revenge.’
He tucked the revolver back into his belt.9
Scenes such as these would be repeated across the city; and few of
them would end as peacefully.
* * *
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berlin at war
In time, the clean-up of the capital began. Most pressingly, the dead
had to be recovered and laid to rest. The Soviet authorities, naturally,
gave priority to their own dead, so only gradually was the wider task
to be tackled. As a result, civilian and military casualties littered the
pavements and lay in their thousands, unidentified and undiscovered,
beneath the rubble, posing a serious health risk as the weather
warmed. Theo Findahl recalled the body of a young man, which lay
in a neighbouring garden; ‘completely blue-black and threatening to
disintegrate’, he wrote.10 There were countless others. The writer Fritz
Raddatz noted that corpses were a common sight: ‘in parkland, by
the side of the road, often so plundered that one could not tell if it
was a soldier or a civilian. Raped women with mouths wide open,
their gold teeth broken out by looters. Some half-charred in the ruins
of burnt-out houses.’11 The stench could be difficult to stomach. One
eyewitness described the city as ‘a stinking jungle’ consisting of ‘dead
horses with bloated bellies, splaying their legs in the air. Disembodied
hands and arms, mutilated corpses and body parts blown against the
house fronts by the explosions.’12 As Raddatz wryly concluded, ‘it was
neither lilacs nor hyacinths that made the air smell so sweet that
spring’.13
The famed
Trümmerfrauen
, or ‘rubble women’, also set to work,
clearing the ruins, patiently passing buckets of debris down a line,
stacking everything that could be reused and disposing of the
remainder. For many of them, it was not a task that was entered into
voluntarily. They were ‘indignant at first’, one eyewitness recalled,
‘[but] sensibly concluded that it would be wisest to work with a will
and finish the task as soon as possible’.14 For all their efforts, it was a
process that would take many years to complete.
Amidst the chaos, one group of inhabitants was already seeking a
swift exit: Berlin’s legions of foreign labourers were mustering to make
their weary way home. Those heading west and south – French,
Belgians, Italians and Dutch – formed small groups with their few
belongings piled onto prams, trolleys or handcarts. Some added a
makeshift flag of their homeland to identify themselves to the Russians.
Frenchman Marcel Elola left Berlin with nothing but the rags he wore,
but he was able to get out of the city, negotiate the Soviet lines and
cross the Elbe into the British-occupied sector of Germany. Within
three weeks he would be home again.15 Those labourers from the east,
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387
meanwhile, faced a more uncertain future. Though Poles and Czechs
would generally be free to leave unhindered, those from the Soviet
Union tended to be seen as traitors to Stalin’s cause and would be
treated as such, many spending years in the work camps of the gulag
on their return.
For all the hard work and political uncertainty that the city faced,
those first days of peace were also a time of reflection. On the evening
of 9 May 1945, the Wehrmacht gave the last of its situation reports
by radio. This time the broadcast was not sent from Berlin, but from
Flensburg, near the Danish border, where the rump Nazi government
had fled after Hitler’s suicide in the capital at the end of April. ‘Since
midnight’, it declared,
the guns are silent on all fronts. On the order of Grand Admiral
[Dönitz] the Wehrmacht has brought the now hopeless battle to a
close. Thereby, the heroic, six year struggle is completed. It has
brought us great victories, but also heavy defeats. The German
Wehrmacht has finally honourably succumbed to superior force.16
Those proud words may have helped some Germans find succour
or consolation. In the capital at least, however, no one was listening.
Lacking electricity, most Berliners had already reverted to more direct
and primitive sources of information – rumour and hearsay. Their
concerns were also much more immediate: finding food, clean water
and accommodation. Many thought about their loved ones away at
the front, from whom nothing had been heard for many weeks. Others
mourned those they had lost, or returned to the ruins of their former
homes in the city and began the search for their friends and neigh-
bours.
A few also reflected on the twelve years of Nazi rule, and on the
fate that the nation and its once-proud capital had brought upon itself.
The destruction of the city, Karl Deutmann wrote in his diary, had
been ‘pointless, criminal and unconscionable’ while the Nazi regime
itself had been one with ‘worthless’ followers and ‘thieves and para-