The Fall of Berlin 1945 (54 page)

Large numbers of women soon found that they had to queue at medical centres. It was small consolation to find so many in the same condition. One woman doctor set up a venereal diseases clinic in an air-raid shelter, with the sign 'Typhoid' written in Cyrillic outside to keep Russian soldiers away. As the film
The Third Man
illustrated, penicillin was soon the most sought-after item on the black market. The abortion rate also soared. It has been estimated that around 90 per cent of victims who became pregnant obtained abortions, although this figure appears extremely high. Many of the women who did give birth abandoned the child in the hospital, usually because they knew that their husband or fiance would never accept its presence at home.

At times it is hard to know whether young Soviet officers suffered from cynicism or a completely blind idealism. 'The Red Army is the most advanced moral army in the world,' a senior lieutenant declared to a sapper officer. 'Our soldiers attack only an armed enemy. No matter where we are, we always set an example of humanity towards the local population and any displays of violence and looting are totally foreign to us.'

Most frontline rifle divisions demonstrated better discipline than, say, tank brigades and rear units. And a wide range of anecdotal evidence indicates that Red Army officers who were Jewish went out of their way to protect German women and girls. Yet it would appear that the majority of officers and soldiers turned a blind eye to Stalin's order of 20 April, issued through the
Stavka
, ordering all troops 'to change their attitudes towards Germans . . . and treat them better'. Significantly, the reason given for the instruction was that 'brutal treatment' provoked a stubborn resistance 'and such a situation is not convenient for us'.

A liberated French prisoner of war approached Vasily Grossman in the street on 2 May. 'Monsieur,' he said, 'I like your army and that is why it is painful for me to see how it is treating girls and women. It is going to do great harm to your propaganda.' This indeed proved to be the case. In Paris, Communist Party leaders, riding high on the crest of admiration for the Red Army, were appalled when returning prisoners of war recounted the less heroic version of events. But it still took a long time before the message began to get through to the Soviet authorities.

Many think that the Red Army was given two weeks to plunder and rape in Berlin before discipline was exerted, but it was not nearly so simple as that. On 3 August, three months after the surrender in Berlin, Zhukov had to issue even tougher regulations to control 'robbery', 'physical violence' and 'scandalous events'. All the Soviet propaganda about 'liberation from the fascist clique' was starting to backfire, especially when the wives and daughters of German Communists were treated as badly as everyone else. 'Such deeds and unsanctioned behaviour,' the order stated, 'are compromising us very badly in the eyes of German anti-fascists, particularly now that the war is over, and greatly assist fascist campaigns against the Red Army and the Soviet government.'

Commanders were blamed for allowing their men to wander off unsupervised. 'Unsanctioned absences' had to 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 circum- stances 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
Threepenny Opera
, 'First comes food, then come morals.'

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. '
Willkommen in Shanghai,
' remarked one cynic. Young women of thirty looked years older, she noticed.

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 Jünger, 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
Zigarettenwährung
- 'cigarette currency' - so when American soldiers arrived with almost limitless cartons at their disposal, they did not need to rape.

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 '
Heil Stalin!
'

This submissiveness, however, did not stop SMERSH and the NKVD from seeing every fugitive or incident as an example of
Werwolf
activity. Each NKVD Frontier Guards Regiment was arresting over 100 Germans a day in early May. Over half were handed over to SMERSH. Some of the worst denouncers to the Soviet authorities were former Nazis, perhaps trying to put their denunciations in before they themselves were revealed. SMERSH blackmailed former members of the Nazi Party into helping NKVD units hunt down SS and Wehrmacht officers. Squads with sniffer dogs were used to search apartments and allotment sheds, where many German deserters had so recently been hiding from SS and Feldgendarmerie detachments.

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
Werwolf
members, and SMERSH was interested only in confessions. The one sign of overt defiance appears to have been a handful of Nazi posters in Lichtenberg, proclaiming, 'The Party Lives On!' There was also one striking exception to the general pattern of submission. On the night of 20 May, 'an unknown number of bandits' attacked Special NKVD camp No. 10 and liberated 466 prisoners. Major Kyuchkin, the camp commandant, was 'at a banquet' when the attack took place. Beria was furious. After the NKVD's strong criticism of senior army officers for their lack of vigilance, this incident was deeply embarrassing.

Women in Berlin just wanted to get life back to some semblance of normality. The most common sight in Berlin became the
Trümmerfrauen
, the 'rubble women', forming human chains with buckets to clear smashed buildings and salvage bricks. Many of the German men left in the city were either in hiding or had collapsed with psychosomatic illnesses as soon as the fighting was over.

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 '
steht nichts
' - 'nothing is standing' — and Lichterfelde became 'Trichterfelde' — 'the field of craters'. To a large degree this was an outward courage masking resignation and quiet despair. 'People were living with their fate,' remarked one young Berliner.

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'.

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 Walther 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.