Berlin: The Downfall 1945

On 27 May, a beautiful spring day, these German Communists flew over the centre of Berlin to land at Tempelhof aerodrome. They were shaken by the scenes of destruction. The city appeared to be beyond any hope of repair. Their personal feelings were also very mixed. It was a homecoming without conviction. The younger members brought up in the Soviet Union found it strange to hear German spoken on the streets. At the victory celebrations in Moscow two weeks before, Wolf had found himself thinking ‘exactly as a young Russian would have done’. Yet within a couple of days of his arrival, he heard from German Communists just how the Red Army had treated the population. ‘Our frontoviki have wrought havoc,’ he wrote in his diary on 30 May. ‘All women raped. Berliners have no more watches.’ Goebbels’s propaganda about the Red Army had created a terrible fear. ‘Then came the experience, the reality, and as a result the absolute majority of Germans, especially those east of the Elbe, were very, very anti-Soviet.’

The leader of their group in Berlin was the widely loathed and despised Walter Ulbricht, a Stalinist bureaucrat well known for his tactics of denouncing rivals. Beria described him as ‘a scoundrel capable of killing his father and his mother’. Wolf remembers his Saxon accent and high voice. He thought him a ‘heartless’ machine, whose only loyalty was to Soviet policy. Everything that came from Stalin was ‘an absolute order’. Ulbricht told Wolf to abandon any hope of returning to the Soviet Union to continue his studies as an aircraft designer. He was sent to the broadcasting centre on the Masurenallee — the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk was rapidly renamed the Berliner Rundfunk — to carry out propaganda. There, Wolf found himself in charge of a programme called A Sixth of the Earth, devoted to the glorious industrial achievements of the Soviet Union. There was a complete ban from the Soviet authorities, represented in this case by General Vladimir Semyonov, on mentioning the three subjects about which Germans wanted to hear. These ‘taboo themes’ were ‘rape, the fate of [German] prisoners of war and the Oder-Neisse line’ — which meant the loss of Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia to Poland.

Although Soviet propaganda was now running its own programmes, the population of Berlin was ordered to hand in all wireless sets to their nearest military post. Magda Wieland remembers carrying her set to the local kommandantur, but as she came close, she saw the soldiers lounging outside start to look her up and down. She simply dropped the radio set in the middle of the road, turned round and ran.

Berliners, seeing campfires in their streets, shaggy Cossack ponies and even camels, tended to convince themselves that their city was occupied by ‘Mongols’. This was largely a reflection of Goebbels’s propaganda. The hundreds of photographs of Soviet troops in Berlin reveal only a small percentage of Central Asian origin. But weather-beaten skin, which had acquired a brown patina from sebum and dirt, and eyes narrowed from constant exposure to wind gave many soldiers an oriental appearance. One can see a similar effect in photographs of British and French soldiers at the end of the First World War. The bizarre images in Berlin streets lingered. Emaciated urchins played in the ‘burnt-out tanks lying like stranded ships on the roadside’. But soon the blackened hulls were plastered with fly-posters offering dancing classes: a first, desperate attempt at economic revival from what Berliners saw as ‘die Stunde Null’ — the lowest imaginable moment of their lives.

General Berzarin’s main priorities were to restore the basics of life, especially essential services, such as electricity, water and then gas. Of the previous total of 33,000 hospital beds, only 8,500 could now be used. Some events were pointedly symbolic. The first Jewish religious service was held by a Red Army rabbi in the synagogue of the Jewish hospital in the Iranischestrasse on Friday 11 May. It was an understandably emotional occasion for those who had emerged from hiding or who had been saved at the last moment from execution.

Over a million people in the city were without any home at all. They continued to shelter in cellars and air- raid shelters. Smoke from cooking fires emerged from what looked like piles of rubble, as women tried to re-create something like a home-life for their children amid the ruins.

With 95 per cent of the tram system destroyed, and a large part of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn systems still under water from the explosion, to visit friends in other parts of the city required a strength which few possessed. Almost everyone felt weak from hunger, and they had to devote the majority of their energy to foraging. As soon as trains began to run, thousands clung on to the roof or the outside to reach the countryside to find food. They were known as ‘hamsters’, a name coined during the near-starvation of 1918, and the trains were known as the ‘Hamster-express’.

Berliners, however, were still incomparably better off than their compatriots left in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. The repression in East Prussia intensified. On 5 May, Beria sent Colonel General Apollonov there to direct nine NKVD regiments and 400 SMERSH operatives. Their task was ‘to secure the elimination of spies, saboteurs and other enemy elements’, of whom ‘over 50,000’ had already been eliminated since the invasion in January. A population which had stood at 2.2 million in 1940 was reduced to 193,000 at the end of May 1945.

Bearing the brunt of Russian hatred, East Prussia suffered the most terrible fate of all the occupied areas. The land was left devastated for several years. Houses were either burned or stripped down to the most basic fittings. Even light bulbs had been taken by peasant soldiers who had no electricity at home. The farms were dead, with all the livestock slaughtered or taken to Russia. Low-lying ground reverted to swamp. But the fate of the civilians who failed to escape was worst of all. Most women and girls were marched off to the Soviet Union for forced labour ‘in forests, peat bogs and canals for fifteen to sixteen hours a day’. A little over half of them died in the following two years. Of the survivors, just under half had been raped. When they were returned to the Soviet occupied zone of Germany in April 1947, most had to be sent immediately to hospitals because they were suffering from tuberculosis and venereal disease.

In Pomerania, on the other hand, the remaining German population became quite friendly with many of their Soviet occupiers. Pomeranians dreaded the rapidly approaching day when the Poles would assume control and take their revenge. Food was in very short supply, but few actually starved. The early summer at least brought its own harvest of sorrel, nettles and dandelion, although flour was in such short supply that people diluted it with ground birch bark. Soap was unobtainable, so beech ash took the place of washing powder in the laundry.

Yet it was on Polish territory that Beria, almost certainly on Stalin’s orders, concentrated the greatest repressive force once East Prussia had been dealt with. While General Serov was given ten NKVD regiments for the occupation of defeated Germany, General Selivanovsky received fifteen NKVD regiments to police the supposedly allied territory of Poland. Beria also ordered ‘Comrade Selivanovsky to combine the duties of representing the NKVD of the USSR and councillor at the Polish Ministry of Public Security’. This perhaps was the best indication of the truth behind Stalin’s assertion at Yalta that the Soviet Union was interested in ‘the creation of a mighty, free and independent Poland’.

28. The Man on the White Horse

Soviet soldiers seemed to suffer from survivor guilt without knowing it. When they thought of all their comrades who had died, it felt slightly bewildering to be one of those alive at the end. They had ‘hugged each other like brothers’ in relieved congratulation, but many could not sleep well for weeks after the guns had fallen silent. The unaccustomed quietness unnerved them. They also needed to digest what had happened during all those moments when they had not dared to think too much.

There was no doubt that what they had been through was the most important period not just of their own lives, but also of world history. They thought of their homes and girlfriends and wives and how they would be respected members of the community. For women soldiers, however, the prospects were far less promising. There were fewer men to go round. Those who were pregnant knew that they would have to put a brave face on it. ‘So, Ninka,’ a young woman soldier wrote to her friend, ‘you have got a daughter, and I will have a baby and let’s not be sad about not having husbands.’ Most of them had their child and returned home, claiming that their husband had been killed at the front.

The war was an extraordinary experience in other ways. It had provided an exhilarating taste of freedom after the purges of 1937 and 1938. Hopes for a complete end to the terror had arisen. Fascism was defeated. Trotsky was dead. Agreements were being made with the western powers. There seemed no reason for the NKVD to be paranoid any more. But back in the Soviet Union, people had already started to realize from the sudden arrest of friends that the informer was at work again, with NKVD squads on their early-morning calls.