"Poor Germany"

BERLIN AND THE OCCUPATION

I have never read an adequate description of Berlin (and the American zone) in the early days of the Occupation; I think it would best be a subject for fiction.

—Dewilda N. Harris

May 8: Germany has capitulated. It held out six years against a world of enemies, it will recover again [wieder hochkommen].... Dear God—Berlin has had to endure so much, let this be over with.

May 18: In the Tagliche Rundschau big reports about the death camp in Auschwitz. Even if only a small part is true, and I fear it is all true, then the rage of the entire world against the Nazis is understandable. Poor Germany! [armes Deutschland]

—Anne-Marie Durand-Wever

In April 1945, after almost six years of war, the Allied armies had battled their way through German territory. Many German towns and cities capitulated quickly, but no victory was as important and hard won, both symbolically and logistically, as the Soviet capture of Berlin. By April 21, a gruesome, costly battle on the Seelow Heights had brought the Soviets up to the city limits. The Nazi propaganda machine raged on, exhorting Berliners, "Our walls are cracking, but not our hearts." Contemporary reports estimated, however, that some ten thousand residents committed suicide as the Soviets entered, raping, looting, distributing bread, and assuring water supplies all at the same time. Shocked and fascinated journalists (like future chroniclers) reveled in describing—or imagining, based on Soviet press reports—the spectacular last gasps of the "pounded corpse" that had been Nazi Berlin: "The world's fourth city, in its dying hours, was a monstrous thing of almost utter destruction.... Towers of fire surged into the pall of smoke and dust that overhung the dying city." One American chronicler tried to render his impressions for the hometown audience by asking them to imagine the scene as if one were to knock down every building between 34th and 59th Streets and between Eighth and Park Avenues. Then reduce to a burned out shell seven of every ten homes and apartments between 60th and 86th Streets on the West Side, and in the same way that you might sprinkle salt on an egg sprinkle destruction on the remaining sections of just Manhattan.

Within days, Berlin had finally become a battlefront (Frontstadt). There was no functioning transportation or communication system. By April 26, the telephones had stopped working and Berliners cowered in their cellars, cut off from news, awaiting the bitter end. The only thing that still seemed to flow was alcohol—successively liberated by the Berliners and the arriving Soviets—and the amphetamine Pervitin, which people had used to ward off sleep during the nightly bombing raids. Right before midnight on May 1, just as Stalin had envisioned, the red flag was hoisted atop the Reichstag. Some two hundred defenders hung on until May 2, when the SS, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Soviet triumph, blew up a subway tunnel in which people had sought shelter. Horrific rumors of a "death chamber [Todeskammer] under the train tracks" and thousands of casualties (including foreign workers herded into the tunnels) circulated through the city. Countless writers and filmmakers concluded that the city's fate could not be contained in sober, factual accounts, and have vividly depicted the savagery of war's end: the huge casualties as the Soviet armies, competing for Stalin's favor, fought their way into the city, the drunken brutality and sexual violence of the victors, and the determined sadism of the SS, which hanged deserters in the streets even as the flags of surrender were already flying a few streets over.

Es Lebe Berlin: Out of the Rubble

Wolfgang Leonhard, a twenty-four-year-old political officer in the Red Army whose mother, the German Communist exile Susanne Leonhard, was imprisoned in the Gulag, remembered flying, with future East German leader Walter Ulbricht, into a smoldering, still battle-torn Berlin on May 2. Many residents were already wearing white or red armbands. The most prudent among them sported both. German soldiers were being marched out of the city into Soviet captivity. Many would not return for nearly a decade, if ever.

At the same time, the Soviets, fueled by alcohol and embittered by the stubborn German refusal to capitulate, were obsessed with finding and delivering the Fuhrer's body to Stalin. The Soviet newspaper Pravda promised, "Whether he escaped to hell, to the devil's paws, or to the arms of fascist protectors, still he is no more. We shall find out what really happened to him. And if he escaped, we shall find him, no matter where he is." Finally, on May 8, a day after an earlier ceremony with Eisenhower at Rheims, the Germans signed an unconditional surrender in a small villa in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst, which had become the Soviet headquarters.

Reducing Berlin to the "greatest pile of rubble in the world" was not, however, the Soviets' ultimate goal. Berlin was a trophy, not only to be conquered, destroyed, and sexually ravaged, but also to be molded, reconstructed, and displayed. The Red Army and its political advisers were prepared not only for relentless battle but for political and cultural propaganda and civic reconstruction. Already by April 28, the Soviet commander Marshall Berzarin had begun taking charge of the city and ordered it to come to life. Berliners were handed shovels and commanded to remove dead people and animals from the streets and to begin clearing rubble. Long lines of women appeared at the water pumps, and within an astonishingly few days basic order had been restored. Even as fighting still raged in the city center, municipal services lumbered into motion. While initial impressions impelled many observers to draw comparisons to ancient Pompeii—and John Dos Passos recorded that, "The ruin of the city was so immense it took on the grandeur of a natural phenomenon like the Garden of the Gods or the Painted Desert"—Berlin's infrastructure was surprisingly intact, ready for both reconstruction and exploitation. Although the Potsdamer Platz, the lively center of Weimar and Nazi Berlin, had become a "steppe," both the western and eastern suburbs were eerily unscathed. The original material damage, in fact, had been less severe than it appeared to be on camera and in the dramatic reports by both awed and triumphant occupiers or shell-shocked Berliners. Restaurants and cabarets were instructed to open for business. Radio Berlin returned to the air on May 4, and by May 14 the Berlin subway (Ubahn) was sputtering back into service.

As Berliners emerged from the cellars in which they had tried to escape the battle, so did, as is detailed in chapter 3, several thousand of their former neighbors, Jews and "partial" Jews who had survived in the "underground" of hiding and disguise, or in mixed marriages. Already on May 8, the first marriage in liberated Berlin was celebrated between two people who had not been allowed to marry under the Nuremberg racial laws. On May 12, the first Jewish religious service was reported in the reopened synagogue in the Lotringer Strasse. And on May 11 or perhaps 12 (the sources differ), another Jewish religious ceremony, also claimed as the first, was presided over by a Soviet army chaplain, in the Jewish Hospital.

On May 18, the first concert played in the Funkhaus, with Marshall Berzarin seated proudly and reassuringly in the front row. The first public soccer game, on May 20, attracted ten thousand spectators. The first Soviet film was screened on May 22. On May 27, 1945, the Renaissance Theater reopened—bizarrely, the Soviets licensed a premiere performance of Rape of the Sabines. Berzarin, the relatively popular Soviet Stadtkommandant (soon to be killed in a motorcycle accident), and the new Soviet-dominated Magistrat (municipal government) declared "Es lebe berlin!" (Long Live Berlin). Schools reopened and meals for children were organized. In early June, less than a month after war's end, the municipal swimming pools were filled and the telephones were working again. By the end of June, the city library had opened, three major banks (Commerz, Dresden, and Deutsche) were back in business, and four daily newspapers had been licensed. For a while it seemed like everything merited a "first": the first school day, the first wedding, the first concert, the first day at the public beach on Lake Wannsee—even if such activities had been suspended only for a relatively brief time. Newspapers cheered the reopening of the much-worried-about Berlin zoo. Susi, the ape, had made it through everything "in good shape," Berliners were reassured (with accompanying photo) in some of the first editions.

With the war barely over, the Soviets moved to shift away from the angry calls for vengeance issued by Red Army propagandists, such as the Russian-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, to Stalin's new line of "The Hitlers come and go, the German Volk remains." While Red Army soldiers continued to rape and plunder, other troops were handing out bread and working to rapidly restore municipal and cultural services. "Coal, food, and clothing" were the immediate issues, and "from the beginning food was used as a lever to make people work."16 Soviet efforts at control also took more symbolic and fantastic forms; for example, in June the Soviet Military Administration (SMA) placed Berlin on Moscow time, leaving the already disoriented city brightly lit at midnight and dark at 7:00 A.M. In some instances, the sense of insanity generated by the contradictions of Soviet occupation policy became entirely real, when, in some districts, "the Red Army took the job of liberation too literally and opened up not only the prisons and the concentration camps but the lunatic asylums as well." Much to the consternation of the SMA and their German communist allies, a released patient named Spalinger declared himself Kommandant of a Berlin Soviet (workers and soldiers council). He plastered the city with notices calling for the immediate arrest of all Nazi Party members, to be followed by activation of electric, gas, and water supplies, and a complete street cleaning. In May 1945, only the insane, it seemed, could still want to set up a Soviet republic (as imagined by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht after World War I) or, for that matter, demand the full bringing to justice of all Nazis and members of Nazi organizations.

The Soviets were the only Allied power on the ground in Berlin from late April until early July. The terms of unconditional surrender, however, called for dividing Germany into British, American, French, and Soviet zones, with Berlin to be split into four sectors overseen by a joint Kommandatura (military government). The Americans and Soviets would become the dominant and rival occupiers, but initially their approach to Berlin was quite different. For the Red Army, its generals competing fiercely for Stalin's favor, the Nazi capital was the prize that had to be conquered at all cost. To the Americans, hemmed in by Roosevelt's negotiations with Stalin and the various Allied agreements hammered out at Teheran and Yalta, it was not at all clear that Berlin, ugly and ruined, would be worth a conflict with the Soviet Union, not to mention the many casualties its capture would require. Eisenhower, it was widely assumed, was not unhappy to leave the Battle of Berlin to the Russians. Afterward he reportedly concluded that "it is quite likely, in my opinion, that there will never be any attempt to rebuild Berlin." The U.S. diplomat Robert Murphy, who years later decided that American disdain for the Berlin trophy was a monumental error, recorded his impressions when the Americans moved into the city in July 1945:

Two months after their surrender, Berliners still were moving about in a dazed condition. They had endured not only thousand-plane raids for years, but also weeks of Russian close-range artillery fire. In addition to three million Germans in Berlin, thousands of displaced persons were roaming around the shattered city.

After accusing his Soviet allies of having created in Berlin "another Nanking, with Russians instead of Japanese doing the raping, murdering, and looting," Colonel Frank Howley, the American commander, remembered in 1950:

Berlin in late July was still a shambles from the effects of Allied bombing, especially incendiary raids, and of Russian street fighting, but the Russians already had put large squads of German women to work clearing the rubble in various parts of the city. As the women wearily passed the fallen bricks from hand to hand, in a long human chain, they presumably were spurred on to heroic efforts by the great posters the Russians had erected to assure the Germans that they had not been conquered but "liberated" by the Communists from their Fascist oppressors.

When the Americans, practically sneaking past uncooperative Soviet sentries, finally made their way through—"On July 1, 1945, the road to Berlin was the highroad to Bedlam"—they found, somewhat to their displeasure, that everything crucial to the running of the city had already been organized by the SMA. Berlin was divided into twenty administrative districts, each with its own mayor and council. As the Communist leader Ulbricht insisted, "Communists too must learn to become good bureaucrats." He stated his plans for organizing the city in no uncertain terms: "It must look democratic but we must control everything." Adhering to Ulbricht's plan, reliable cadres hovered in less visible second-ranking positions while the SMA installed Popular Front figureheads—such as the renowned surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, who obediently served through all twentieth-century German regimes, or Catholic Center Party politician Andreas Hermes—in the newly constituted Magistrat. Deputy Mayor Kurt Maron, a tough Communist who was the real power behind the fellow-traveling Lord Mayor Werner, appealed in melodramatic tones, and with liberal repetition of its name, to the city's still extant local patriotism: "Get to work Berlin! Berlin must not and will not go under.... Berlin, our lovely Berlin has sunk in debris and rubble. Berliners, let's get rid of the filth in our streets and squares!" Evoking the physical destruction of the city as a reflection of Nazi rule, he admonished Berliners to "get rid also of all the filth in our hearts and minds." Indeed, by the time the Americans and British moved in, "the Russians had been in the city for nine weeks; a single Communist-controlled union, four political parties, a police force, and a municipal government were already established; and 80% of the factories that had survived the war had been dismantled."

The Americans officially occupied McNair Barracks on July 4, and quickly discovered that they faced more outright opposition from their Soviet allies than from the thoroughly "whipped" Berliners. The confrontation with the Nazi death camps had provoked deep anger at the Germans and uneasy compassion for their victims among the U.S. liberators, but the shock of witnessing what seemed to be a thoroughly destroyed capital, with its pathetic-looking, hungry, and exhausted population, also produced sympathy for the defeated Germans among top American officials. When Secretary of State James Byrnes—who a year later would articulate a new, more conciliatory stance toward Germany in the context of Cold War conflicts—toured the city with President Truman on the eve of the Potsdam Conference, he noted, "Despite all we had read of the destruction there, the extent of the devastation shocked us. It brought home the suffering that total war visits upon old folks, women, and children, besides the men in uniform." Other observers were less charitable. "The city was like a vast archeological excavation where only foundations could be traced, with an occasional bit of wall," the American Jewish writer Meyer Levin noted with some satisfaction. Berlin certainly was "all it was cracked up to be," an American Jewish GI wrote home sarcastically (and a bit jubilantly) on letter paper confiscated from Hitler's destroyed Chancellery.