After the Reich (20 page)

At least, Berliners might have imagined it was over, but they knew what to expect. The only thing Goebbels had not mooted were the occasional acts of kindness. Charlottenburg, where the journalist Margret Boveri lived, was an affluent area, and one of the last to surrender. She became aware of the change in the situation when she ventured out on to the streets to obtain her last quarter-pound of butter. She found Russians already sniffing at the queues. Most of the Berliners had thought it prudent to don white armbands. They openly complained of the Party for the first time. When she got home she found that German soldiers had broken into a neighbour’s cellar to steal civilian clothes. They intended to make a break for the west: no one wanted to be caught by the Russians.
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The Russians picked over the city, exploring their new prize. The impotent and ruinous Reichstag building became the symbol of Russian victory. It had ceased to function as a democratic assembly soon after Hitler came to power. Marshal Zhukov added his signature to the others on the stonework of the interior.
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The journalist Konstantin Simonov wandered around the Tiergarten. He looked in at the Zoo to see the dead and emaciated animals lying beside the bodies of SS men. He went to the huge Anti-Aircraft Tower that had fought to the last. Inside there had been drunken orgies as the last act had been played out. There were the bodies of suicides everywhere. In one cubicle he found a dead SS general, his uniform tunic unbuttoned and a bottle of champagne between his legs. He had committed suicide with his mistress, who lay beside him in a pretty white blouse and skirt. He went on to the Reich Chancellery where agents of Soviet Military Intelligence, or Smersh, had already identified the bodies of Goebbels and his wife and children. Hitler and Eva Braun eluded them for the time being.
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Schwerin von Krosigk spoke on the airwaves: ‘The world can only be pacified if the Bolshevik wave can be prevented from overwhelming it.’
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The Russians were drunk, and not just with victory. ‘Woina kaputt!’ (The war’s over!) and ‘Gitler durak!’ (Hitler’s a blockhead!). The terror began quietly in Margret Boveri’s Charlottenburg. ‘Ich Pistol!’ announced the soldiers. ‘Du Papier!’ That meant that they had guns, and no amount of paperwork was going to do you any good if you wanted to hang on to property or virtue. ‘There is nothing in this city that isn’t theirs for the taking,’ reported another woman who lived near Neukölln in the south.
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At first the Russian soldiers came for watches. With a cry of ‘Uhri! Uhri!’
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they snatched, sometimes discarding the previous acquisition, which had simply stopped and needed to be rewound. This anonymous ‘Woman’ saw many Red Army soldiers with whole rows of watches on their arms ‘which they continuously kept winding, comparing and correcting - with childish, thievish pleasure’.
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For the Russians, Berlin - even in its ruinous state - was the picture of sophistication. They thought that the light was captured in lightbulbs and unscrewed them to send them home. They were fascinated by lavatories with flushes - and allegedly used them to wash their potatoes in. Little things, like cigarette lighters, were not only new, but utterly enchanting to them.
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Some Berliners came out well from the experience. One Charlottenburger was seized and stripped of his elegant leather jacket. The Russian assailant tossed him his windcheater in return. His initial despondency at the exchange soon turned to jubilation: in the pockets of the soldier’s garment he found two watches and two pieces of jewellery, including a valuable ring. Ruth Friedrich watched a Mongol soldier, who had befriended them, empty his pockets of wristwatches, lighters, golden rings and silver necklaces, ‘like a child, calling them “trophies”’.
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Margret Boveri remarked that the men of the Red Army:

were like children in their glee over the new watches. One of them gazed alternately at his wristwatch and then pulled a pocket watch out and held it to his ear; we watchless ones, on the other hand, could only guess at the time. They sang and danced and played mouth organ and harmonica . . . and then they played ancient German records on a stolen German gramophone. The scene in the courtyard was reminiscent of the description of the Cossacks in
Memories of an Old Man
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The Woman saw her liberators discard a collection of classical 78s, including
Lohengrin
and Beethoven’s Ninth, in favour of a record playing an advertising jingle from C&A in the Spittalmarkt.
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Nicolas Nabokov had a clear memory of Berlin at this time: ‘In front of the Adlon [hotel] stand two trucks. The first one contains a mountain of brass: tubas, trumpets and trombones covered by heavy Bokhara rugs. On top of the rugs sit three sullen-looking Mongoloid soldiers. Their uniforms are tattered. They are eating bread. The second truck stands half-cocked on three wheels, blocking the traffic. It contains thousands of naked typewriters, and standing in their midst a cow moos . . .’
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Gramophones were the Russians’ special delight. They played them non-stop until they were broken and then they had to purloin another. The Russian inability to master anything technical was ‘an inexhaustible chapter’.
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They stole all the bicycles they could find. The Woman saw them take them up to a street near the Hasenheide where they practised riding them. They sat ‘stiff on the saddles like chimpanzees in the zoo’.
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They frequently fell off before they mastered the use of the two-wheeled beast. Many bicycles were broken in the process and the wreckage strewn over the street. Ruth Friedrich’s friends collected up the bits and assembled new vehicles from them.
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The Russians were in the main ‘as good-natured as children. Some of them were sadists for all that.’
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Later they came looking for all stocks of food the Berliners had so carefully amassed. They liberated any alcohol they could lay their hands on. Drunk, they were even less easy to control. Then they amused themselves by setting fire to buildings. Anything they did not steal they destroyed: valuable antiques and musical instruments, elegant clothes and works of art. Flats were requisitioned for the use of officers, the occupants chased away with knives and pistols. But on that first day the Charlottenburger were more frightened of what the Americans would do; it was thought they were even more bent on revenge than the Russians.
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Then the rape and slaughter began in earnest. Conservative estimates place the number of Berlin women raped at 20,000.
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It began in Neukölln at 6 p.m. on 27 April. In the Woman’s cellar they went for the distiller’s wife first, as she appeared to promise two pleasures; after that it was the baker’s wife. The Woman thought the fattest were most in danger, because fat, for a Russian, represented good health. The rapists left the scrawnier, half-starved Berlin women until last.
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Anxious parents hid their still virginal daughters in lofts, in cupboards or under sofas. The Woman described the dislocated experience of rape. The feeling was more of paralysis than disgust. She felt an utter coldness, ‘the spine seems to be frozen, icy dizziness encircles the back of the head . . . It’s like sinking through the floor.’ When her attacker left he tossed her a packet of cigarettes.
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Margret Boveri first came face to face with it when she visited some friends in plush Dahlem in the south-west of the city. They had been ‘liberated’ several days before. The worst cases involved very young children or elderly ladies, and the victims were often killed afterwards. Sometimes they took their own lives. In one instance soldiers raped the sisters who worked as nurses in the military hospital, infecting them with syphilis at the same time.
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It was rumoured that the severity of the rapine was caused by the fact the Russians had sent in units made up of criminals - such as the Nazis had used at the time of the Warsaw Uprising - but this was later revealed to have been untrue. Rapists were threatened with gruesome punishments, but the prospect of satisfying their lust proved stronger than the fear of chastisement.

That the Russians had received some sort of order was made clear to the Woman, who spoke a rudimentary Russian and could understand some of the exchanges between the conquerors. One officer reprimanded a soldier with the words ‘ukas Stalina’ (Stalin’s orders), but the man answered back, saying the Germans had raped his sister. While the Woman was raped later by two Russians, a female soldier interrupted her comrades. When she saw what they were doing she merely laughed. The Woman promptly complained to another officer, but he dismissed her. They had not done her any harm, and all his men were healthy, he said.
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Ruth Friedrich was spared, largely because her lover, the conductor Leo Borchard, spoke fluent Russian. She visited a friend who had been raped by seven soldiers, ‘one after the other, like beasts’. ‘We need to commit suicide . . . we certainly can’t live like this,’ the friend said.
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Ruth’s friend Frank addressed the Russian need for women: the euphoria of victory manifested itself in the flesh of Berlin’s womenfolk; the Russians took bodily possession of German soil, bit by bit; and bodily they consumed German flesh, night by night.
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The preferred form of suicide was poison, and there was much discussion of the best and most painless way to quit life. The discussions had started before the Russians arrived. It had been a favourite topic of conversation between Hitler and his secretaries at their nocturnal teas.
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Berlin women, it seems, were short of food, but well provided with poison. There were instances of mass-suicide by poison. The actor Paul Bildt and some twenty others despatched themselves thus, only he woke again and lived for another dozen years. His daughter was among the dead. Attesting once more to the incidence of suicide among the nobles, especially those who lived on isolated estates in the Mark Brandenburg, the writer cites a number of cases showing how far the old families would go to protect the dignity of their daughters: death was preferable to dishonour.

Elsewhere the rapes soon became routine and when it was not accompanied by violence it could eventually be laughed off. A kind of gallows humour grew up that was encapsulated in the expression ‘Besser ein Iwan auf dem Bauch als ein Ami auf dem Kopf!’ (Better a Russki on the belly than a Yank on the head!), meaning that rape was preferable to being blown up by a bomb. The Woman’s friend, a widow, was over fifty when she was raped by an unbearded boy. He later paid her a compliment, saying she was considerably tighter than the women of the Ukraine. She was proud of the remark and repeated it to other women.
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One journalist of Margret Boveri’s acquaintance, for example, was able to make light of her rape, even if she had cried at the time - ‘in retrospect the story sounded very funny: the hanging water bottle and all the other bits of equipment getting in the way, the inexperience of the young man and the speed at which it was consummated’.
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Margret commented: ‘Middle-class people have never spoken so frankly about sex before. Are they really sympathising with the victims, or is it more erotic titillation? There is a good deal of longing for love in our city, deprived of men, and there are many unconscious ways to compensate.’
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Her friend Elsbeth, herself a victim of a savage rapist who had not only cracked her skull but knocked out most of her teeth, lost her middle-class prudishness with the experience. Such matters were discussed openly for the first time: ‘naturally there is lots to laugh about’.
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In a frightful twist in the gallows humour of the time, Berlin children used to play the ‘Frau komm mit!’ game, with the boys taking the part of the soldiers and the girls their victims. In normal times the children had mimicked ‘Zurücktreten, Zug fährt ab!’ (Stand back! The train is leaving!), a line they heard every time they took the U- or S-Bahn, Berlin’s metro system. During the war it had been ‘Achtung! Achtung! Schwacher Kampfverband über Perleberg in Richtung auf die Reichshauptstadt’ (Warning! Warning! A light enemy squadron is over Perleberg, flying in the direction of the Imperial Capital).
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Very few escaped the rapine, although the Swiss Max Schnetzer reported areas that were spared ‘like a hailstorm that only destroys part of the harvest’.
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One acquaintance of Margret Boveri’s who refused was shot. Another, who was left miraculously alone, explained this by telling the writer that the Russians didn’t like women who wore spectacles. The presence of very small children cooled off the lusty Russians on occasion. As we have seen, Russian sentiment about children was well known. Also pregnant women were avoided. The Russians were ‘horribly normal’ and the Woman could think of no instance of ‘Man come!’ There was a lesbian living in her block who dressed as a man, and who was never molested.
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