cease. Sergeants and corporals were to check that their men were present every morning and every evening. Soldiers were to be issued with identity cards. Troops were not to leave Berlin without movement orders. In fact, the order contained a list of measures which any western army would have considered as normal even in barracks at home.
Articles in the international press followed the subject throughout the summer. The effect on client Communist Parties abroad, then at the height of their prestige, clearly alarmed the Kremlin. ‘This scoundrel campaign,’ wrote Molotov’s deputy, ‘is aimed to damage the very high reputation of the Red Army and to shift the responsibility for all that is happening in the occupied countries on to the Soviet Union… Our numerous friends all over the world need to be armed with information and facts for counter-propaganda.’
Standards of morality had indeed taken a battering, but in the circumstances there was little option. On returning to Berlin, Ursula von Kardorff saw the scenes of impoverished people bartering near the Brandenburg Gate. She was immediately reminded of a line in Brecht’s
The Brandenburg Gate had become the main focus for barter and the black market at the beginning of May, when liberated prisoners of war and forced labourers traded their loot. Ursula von Kardorff found all sorts of women prostituting themselves for food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. ‘
The need to survive had distorted more than just morals. The anonymous diarist, a former publisher, was approached by a Soviet sailor so young that he should still have been at school. He asked her to find him a clean and decent girl who was of good character and affectionate. He would provide her with food, the usual ration being bread, herring and bacon. The writer Ernst Junger, when a Wehrmacht officer in occupied Paris, observed that food is power. The power, of course, becomes even greater when a woman has a child to feed, as so many German soldiers found in France. In Berlin, the black-market exchange rate was based on
The definition of rape had become blurred into sexual coercion. A gun or physical violence became unnecessary when women faced starvation. This could be described as the third stage in the evolution of rape in Germany in 1945. The fourth was a strange form of cohabitation in which many Soviet officers settled in with German ‘occupation wives’ who replaced the Soviet ‘campaign wife’. Real wives back in the Soviet Union had been furious to hear of ‘campaign wives’, but their moral outrage knew no bounds when they heard of the new trend. The Soviet authorities were also appalled and enraged when a number of Red Army officers, intent on staying with their German mistresses, deserted once it was time to return to the Motherland.
After being approached by the young sailor, the diarist wondered whether she herself had become a whore by accepting the protection and nutritional largesse of a cultivated Russian major. Like most of his countrymen, he respected her education, while German men she knew tended to dislike women who had been to university. Yet wherever the truth lay between rape and prostitution, these pacts to obtain food and protection had thrown women back to a primitive, almost primeval state.
Ursula von Kardorff, on the other hand, foresaw that although German women had been forced to become even more resilient than German men, they would soon have to revert to stereotype on the men’s return from prison camps. ‘Perhaps we women,’ she wrote, ‘now face our hardest job in this war — to give understanding and comfort, support and courage to so many utterly defeated and desperate men.’
Germany had fought on for as long and as bitterly as it did because the idea of defeat produced ‘a conviction of total catastrophe’. Germans believed that their country would be totally subjugated and that their soldiers would spend the rest of their lives as slaves in Siberia. Yet once resistance collapsed with Hitler’s death, the change in German attitudes surprised Russians in Berlin. They were struck ‘by the docility and discipline of the people’, having half-expected the sort of ferocious partisan war which the Soviet people had mounted. Serov told Beria that the population was behaving ‘with unquestioning obedience’. One of Chuikov’s staff officers ascribed this to an ingrained ‘respect for the powers that be’. At the same time, Red Army officers were amazed at the way so many Germans, quite unselfconsciously, produced Communist flags out of scarlet Nazi banners with the swastika cut out of the centre. Berliners referred to this turnaround as ‘
This submissiveness, however, did not stop SMERSH and the NKVD from seeing every fugitive or incident as an example of
Soviet sabotage theories included the idea ‘that leaders of fascist organizations are preparing mass poisonings in Berlin through selling poisoned lemonade and beer’. Children found playing with panzerfausts and abandoned weapons faced interrogation as suspected
Women in Berlin just wanted to get life back to some semblance of normality. The most common sight in Berlin became the
Like most working parties, the women were paid at first in little more than handfuls of potatoes, yet the Berliner sense of humour did not fail. Every district was renamed. Charlottenburg had become ‘Klamottenberg’, which means ‘heap of rubbish’, Steglitz became ‘
Employees and officials obeyed General Berzarin’s order to return to their workplaces. SMERSH officers, using NKVD troops, cordoned off the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk building on the Masurenallee. All members of the staff were told to stand by their desks. They were deeply relieved that they had not tried to sabotage or destroy their equipment. The SMERSH officer in charge, Major Popov, who was accompanied by German Communists, treated them well. He also made sure that the troops protected the large number of young women in the building, even though this did not save them a few days later, when they were allowed to make their way home.
The German Communists brought back from the ‘Moscow emigration’ were totally subservient to their Soviet masters. They may have been on the winning side, but a profound sense of failure hung over them. This was because the German working class had done nothing to prevent the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Their Soviet comrades did not let them forget this. Scathing remarks about the numbers of Germans who had emerged, claiming to be members of the Communist Party before 1933, provoked an angry disbelief that so few had taken up arms against the regime. The fact that the only well-known resistance to Hitler had existed in ‘reactionary circles’ did not improve their mood.
Beria regarded the leading Communists as ‘idiots’ and ‘careerists’. The only one for whom he had any respect was the veteran leader, Wilhelm Pieck, a white-haired burly man with a round nose and a square head. The group being sent from Moscow to Germany met in Pieck’s room before leaving. ‘We had no idea what role [the German Communist] Party was to play or whether it would even be permitted,’ recorded Markus Wolf, later the chief of East German intelligence in the Cold War. ‘Our task was simply to support the Soviet military authorities.’ He admitted that he was ‘naive enough to hope that the majority of Germans were happy to be freed from the Nazi regime and would greet the Soviet army as their liberator’.
