The German War (92 page)

As in the other great capitals of Budapest and Vienna, which had fallen on 13 February and 13 April respectively, in Berlin conquest was accompanied by mass rape. As many as 10–20 per cent of the women fell victim. During the battle for Berlin and the first weeks of May, women were raped in cellars, in their flats and on the street, in front of neighbours, husbands, children and strangers. In Wilmersdorf too the rapes started the night Red Army soldiers arrived. As Hertha von Gebhardt tried to hide her daughter Renate behind her, she hoped each time a Russian entered their cellar that he would take another woman. In Zehlendorf, a friend of Ursula von Kardorff who had hidden behind a heap of coal was betrayed by a neighbour anxious to protect her own daughter, and then gang-raped by twenty-three soldiers. Like many of the victims, she had to be taken to the hospital to stop the haemorrhaging. She told Kardorff four months later, ‘I never want to have anything to do with a man again.’ The journalist Margret Boveri, who had relished watching air raids from her balcony, became so anxious that she started taking sleeping tablets to get through the night.
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The weeks of unbridled fear in Berlin were seared deeply into popular consciousness, leading middle-aged women of the polite and educated classes to discard their reticence and discuss how they could protect themselves and what they had had to endure. One Communist militant, Hilde Radusch, reported that some women defended themselves by inserting into their vagina a copper stopper which they had obtained from a plumber. The copper rim would then cut the penis of their assailant. ‘And then the Russian came out howling,’ Radusch recounted with a certain
Schadenfreude
thirty-six years later, ‘with no idea what had happened to them. And from then on the house was called “the house with the crazy women”.’ Mothers cut short the hair of their adolescent daughters and dressed them as boys to protect them. When a woman doctor helped hide several young women by putting up signs on the door in German and Russian warning of typhoid, news of this haven spread like wildfire among the women gathered at the water pump in the street. Such survival stratagems became legendary precisely because women’s powerlessness and fear of rape and assault were universal.
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One of the least famous but most common forms of safety was provided by Soviet officers determined to restore order. A Russian officer agreed to sleep in the cellar next to Hertha and Renate von Gebhardt for the first few nights to protect them. In Schwerin, the war reporter Vasily Grossman noted that ‘A Jewish commander whose whole family was killed by the Germans, is quartered in the apartment of a Gestapo man who has fled. The wife and children are safe with him and the whole family weeps and pleads with him to stay when he wants to leave.’ Such protection was partly a matter of goodwill, partly a centrally directed policy. Shortly before the attack across the Oder, Soviet propaganda had changed dramatically: in place of inciting troops to kill Germans, the message was to distinguish between Nazis and ordinary Germans. The final conquest of Germany was meant to be more orderly. By comparison with the chaos and massacres of civilians during the winter conquest of East Prussia and Silesia, it was. Nonetheless, it still took weeks to bring the troops under control in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest.
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Christa J. later recalled that in the Prenzlauerberg district many of her class of 14- and 15-year-olds were raped. Unable to speak about it, some teenagers constructed stories in which other girls and women were raped but not the narrator herself. ‘I too was hidden, somewhere in the cellar,’ Christa explained. In Vienna, 14-year-old Hermine told how she and a friend were discovered hiding behind a curtain when a Soviet soldier burst into their flat. Hermine’s mother then placed her baby in her teenage daughter’s arms, hoping that he would protect her. ‘The soldier gestured to make clear that I should pass the infant on,’ Hermine recalled over fifty years later. After some further altercation, the soldier – inexplicably – left. Whereas many adult women spoke matter-of-factly of their own rape, those who were teenagers at the time often found it far harder to do so either then or subsequently.
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Gabriele Köpp had fled from Schneidemühl in West Prussia in February 1945, but they had been overrun by the Red Army. The 15-year-old was raped multiple times. Even afterwards when she stayed with her cousin on a farm in Pomerania, she had to hide each time Soviet soldiers came to the farm because the farmer’s wife tried to protect herself by pointing Gabriele out to them. In the following months, she consoled herself by composing a letter to her mother. ‘I am not that big and old. I can’t really talk properly about everything with anyone,’ she wrote. ‘I am so alone. I am so frightened, because I am not getting my time of feeling unwell. Soon it’ll already be ten weeks [since my last period]. You could help me for sure.’ She was never able to send the letter and it took another fifty-eight years before she was able to talk about what had happened to her in 1945.
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By the end of April, Unterbernbach stood in a kind of no-man’s-land, skirted by the fighting and unoccupied, the village a transit point for German stragglers trying to get home. On 28 April, German troops had fled from their positions in the meadow and woodland after a brief skirmish, and, even though a few SS men were still in the village, the mayor had the swastika emblem removed from the gable of the district office. Flammensbeck was busy shedding his Nazi persona and rediscovering his Catholic heritage. As Victor Klemperer noted, the farmers’ leader now accused the Nazis of having ‘been “too radical”, they had deviated from their programme, they had not treated religion with consideration’. To escape the hothouse atmosphere, Victor and Eva found solitude by retreating to the small wood to the north of the village, where they read aloud to each other. When three soldiers came out of the trees to ask if the Americans were already in Unterbernbach, the Klemperers advised them to get hold of civilian clothes, and which places to avoid. The couple were struck by the young soldiers’ helplessness: ‘all three have good faces, undoubtedly from good families, perhaps students . . . as ardently as we have longed for the loss of the war and as necessary as this loss is for Germany (and truly for mankind) – we nevertheless felt sorry for the boys.’ For Victor Klemperer they were an allegory of the lost war.
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Cut off in Flensburg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was as surprised as anyone to learn that he was Hitler’s final choice as heir. Aware that one of his Führer’s final acts had been to order the arrest of Göring and Himmler for trying to negotiate with the Western Allies, Dönitz circumspectly waited till Bormann confirmed by telex on the afternoon of 1 May that the ‘testament was in force’, before approaching the British and Americans himself. There was a prospect that the German divisions cut off in Courland could be brought back to Copenhagen, which was still under German occupation, or to the German North Sea ports. But when the British crossed the Elbe and advanced into Schleswig-Holstein, they cut the link to Denmark and the passage through the narrows of the Baltic to the North Sea. Bremen had already been comprehensively destroyed in a week of fighting, and holding the North Sea ports no longer served any purpose. Dönitz persisted in demanding that Breslau and the 40,000 civilians besieged there since January should continue to ‘hold out’ against the Soviets, but on 3 May he agreed to surrender Hamburg to the British.

The next day, the surrender of the Wehrmacht in northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands was agreed with the commander of British forces, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and set to come into force on 5 May, the day that Army Group G also capitulated to the Americans in the south. Dönitz, Jodl, Keitel and Schwerin von Krosigk, the remaining military and political leadership of the Third Reich, still hoped that they were concluding a separate armistice in the west, so that they could execute a fighting withdrawal from the eastern front and save as many divisions from surrendering to the Soviets as possible. It was a complex and dangerous manoeuvre, but during the first week of May as many as 1.8 million German soldiers managed to disengage from the Red Army and surrender to the Western powers.
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In Breslau itself, a delegation of Protestant and Catholic clergy called on General Niehoff on 4 May, asking him: ‘Is continuing the defence of Breslau something which you could justify to God?’ Niehoff took heed and quietly set about negotiating a ceasefire, despite the pressure from Dönitz to hold out – transmitted by both the new Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal Schörner, and Gauleiter Hanke, the new head of the SS. In his proclamation to his troops on 5 May, Niehoff pointed out that ‘Hitler is dead, Berlin has fallen. The Allies of East and West have shaken hands in the heart of Germany. Thus the conditions for a continuation of the struggle for Breslau no longer exist. Every further sacrifice is a crime.’ With a gesture to Simonides’ epitaph to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, he concluded, ‘We have done our duty, as the law demanded.’ The next day, the Germans handed over their positions.
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August Töpperwien had been shielded by the battle for Breslau. As he carried on running his prisoner-of-war camp at Petersdorf in Upper Silesia, on 2 May he had listened to Dönitz’s appeal to the German people to go on fighting the British and Americans as long as they sided with Bolshevism. Töpperwien finally acknowledged that Hitler’s ‘terrible miscalculation’ – underlined in red in his diary – was ‘to make war against the Anglo-Americans when his real enemy is Bolshevism!?!’ In his despair at Germany’s impending defeat, the Gymnasium teacher returned once more to his belief that ‘A mankind who wages war like this has become godless. The Russian barbarities in the German east – the terror attacks of the Anglo-Americans – our struggle against the Jews (sterilisation of healthy women, shooting everyone from infants to old women, gassing of Jewish transport trains)!’
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Töpperwien had acknowledged the full scale of the German extermination of the Jews once before, back in November 1943. Whatever knowledge he had accumulated about transport trains and gas chambers he had pushed aside until Germany’s final defeat forced him to reflect once more on what he knew. But by equating the murder of the Jews with Allied bombing and Bolshevik terror, morally condemning these acts of extreme immorality as ‘godless’, his words acknowledged and simultaneously dissipated guilt by relativising and diffusing it. And his own
völkisch
belief in Germans’ ‘civilising mission’ meant that he could never equate the nations which had committed these acts. On 3 May, he tuned in to hear the radio appeal of the new German Foreign Minister, Schwerin von Krosigk, to the Western powers to fight Bolshevism jointly and he asked himself: ‘Would it have been possible to get England and America to join the anti-Bolshevik front in spite of Liberalism and World Jewry?!?!’ Whatever his sense of moral horror at the murder of the Jews, August Töpperwien still counted them amongst Germany’s most powerful adversaries. On 6 May, the same day that Breslau fell, Captain August Töpperwien was taken prisoner by the Soviets, abandoning his diary in the attic of a house where it was discovered by Polish schoolchildren fifty years later.
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While the farmers slaughtered their pigs in Unterbernbach so that the Americans would not take them, on the afternoon of 2 May Victor Klemperer walked to the next village to go shopping. In the church square he saw his first Americans, a column of repair vehicles. Most of them were black soldiers. Falling into conversation with a young German woman in a side street, he learned that apart from ransacking the shops on the first day, the troops ‘had been altogether decently behaved. “The blacks too?” She almost beamed with delight. “They’re even friendlier than the others, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”’ Since the shops were likely to remain closed for a week, she showed him how to buy bread at the back door of the bakery.

On his return to Unterbernbach Klemperer found two more stragglers at Flammensbeck’s table, young men in their early twenties, one of them a law student. They were trying to get home to the Sudetenland and confirmed that Hitler was dead and Berlin had capitulated. As ever, Klemperer was trying to gauge what they believed:

The student declared: ‘If anyone had told me that, even four weeks ago, I would have shot him down – but now I don’t believe anything any more . . .’ They had wanted too much, there had been atrocities, the way people had been treated in Poland and Russia, inhuman! ‘But the Führer probably knew nothing about it’ . . . Neither quite believed in the ‘turning-point’ and the imminent war between the USA and Russia, but they did a little bit nevertheless.

It was clear to Klemperer that these soldiers were unable to imagine life beyond the war and the impending German defeat. By now, Flammensbeck was beginning to ‘talk as if Hitlerism had been essentially a Prussian, militaristic, un-Catholic, un-Bavarian cause’. Klemperer had to remind himself that the movement had originated in Munich. Still unwilling to reveal his Jewish identity in what he took to be a traditionally anti-Semitic, Catholic village, he quietly told the local teacher and Flammensbeck that ‘perhaps I could be of assistance . . . At some point, my name was respected, and the Nazis had forced me out of my post.’ Meanwhile, the village was ‘revelling in meat and fat and every kind of food surplus’.
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On 6 May, the Commander-in-Chief in the West, Kesselring, surrendered the so-called ‘alpine redoubt’ at Berchtesgaden, where the Allies had feared that the Nazi leaders would make their last stand. That same day, Dönitz sent Jodl to Reims to negotiate a general armistice in the west with Eisenhower. Unlike Montgomery, Eisenhower refused point-blank to negotiate anything that suggested a separate peace; demanding complete capitulation, he threatened to resume the bombing of German cities. At 2.41 a.m. on 7 May, Jodl signed. Later that day the remaining German garrisons surrendered the French ports of St-Nazaire, Lorient and La Rochelle. Only in Prague did German troops continue fighting, partly in the hope of crossing the Soviet lines and into American captivity. Sixteen minutes after the complete ceasefire had come into effect at midnight on 8–9 May, the surrender ceremony itself was repeated at Zhukov’s headquarters outside Berlin at Karlshorst. This time a full surrender document had been drawn up which representatives of all three arms of the Wehrmacht and, most importantly, all of the Allies signed. The following evening, at its normal slot of 8 p.m., the Wehrmacht broadcast its final bulletin of the war from Flensburg: