After the Reich (23 page)

The Russians provided some food from the beginning. There were fixed and mobile canteens serving hot soup. In three months they delivered 188,000 tons of food to Berlin. Baking began again on 9 May. It was black and wet, but it was bread of sorts. Ration cards were introduced on the 17th. The cards were graded I-V. Later a card VI was printed. The largest rations went to the workers who were eligible for card I: 600 grams of bread, 30 of fat and 100 of meat; Nazis and housewives received the ‘Hunger Card’ - number V: that meant 300 grams of bread, 7 of fat and 20 of meat. Ruth Friedrich knew a woman who had card V. Her husband had been a Pg, and she had five children. As they received the food, she lay in bed, because she was too hungry to stand. She weighed just forty kilos.
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Margret Boveri lists the contents of her larder and the occasional feasts she ate during those meagre days. A surprise visit from Elvira von Zitzewitz was used as a pretext to bring out some of the best things she had: soup made from a stock prepared from the lung of a horse slaughtered in the street below, in the last moments of the war; then potatoes boiled in their skins; the remains of some
pasta e piselli
; and, to finish, a dessert made from ‘pudding powder’ and some cherry compôte that had begun to ferment: ‘a meal for the gods!’
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Many Berliners grew potatoes among the ruins. Others had window boxes filled with chervil and borage.
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The Charlottenburger seem to have had the pick of the horses. When Ruth Friedrich walked down the Chaussee (now Strasse des 17 Juni) on 17 May the street stank of rotting horse carcasses. The bones were picked quite clean.
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It could only get worse. Shortage of milk drove mothers in Neukölln to the local Russian command, or Kommandatura. They said their children would die without milk. The Soviets replied that it made no difference if they died now or in a year’s time. At the end of June the Russians rounded up the ninety cows in the model farm in Dahlem. Their milk had been largely reserved for them anyhow, but it was bad for morale to see them leave for Russia. The animals were suffering from foot and mouth disease, and it was questionable whether they would make it alive.
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That being said, the Russians stressed from the beginning that they intended to feed the Berliners; they created a political structure and encouraged cultural activity. They did not treat the Germans as the Germans had vowed to deal with them. The Germans were not to be exterminated.

Those who acquiesced when it came to marauding Russian soldiers could do considerably better. After a visit by the usual posse of Russians, the Woman counted her blessings. She had bread, herrings (they had been cut up on the mahogany table), tinned meat and the remains of a flitch of bacon, all brought by her visitors. When the Russians left, they took only the alcohol away with them: ‘I have not eaten so well in years,’ she concluded. Later a Russian arrived with a couple of small turbot. Even more astonishing was a later visit when one of her admirers brought her a bottle of tokay.
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By mid-June the prices of food on the ‘free’ market were astronomical: strawberries (then in season) were 7.50 Reichsmarks a pound; a kohlrabi, 50 Pfennigs, but you had to queue for four hours to get one and the chances were that the shop would be sold out. On the black market a pound of meat fetched 100 Reichsmarks, and by July the price of a kilo tin of dripping had risen to RM500. Watches and jewellery could be exchanged for food from the Russians in the Keithstrasse.
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The wartime staple had been potatoes. Margret Boveri’s last delivery had been in October 1944, which she eked out until mid-July, by which time they were quite blue inside. Every now and again she and her friends alighted on a windfall crop in a park or garden. On 18 July she made a list of what she had been able to obtain so far that month: two kohlrabis, a small lettuce, 250 grams of blackcurrants, 600 grams of sugar, ‘and for 500 gm worth of coupons, 300 gm of meat. There are no potatoes and no fat. There is neither salt nor vinegar. Now, however, I can queue up for bread.’ By the end of the month there had been much promised, but little received: no fat, meat, fruit, vegetables, vinegar, ersatz coffee or salt all month; just a part of the potatoes, bread, 620 grams of sugar, 600 grams of flour and seven stock cubes.
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Berliners felt totally cut off from the outside world. There was no transport (all bicycles and cars were liable to requisition) and there was no telephone. Meanwhile the Russians were pulling up one set of railway lines on every track and taking these away with them. Anyone who had illegally retained their wireless set had to reckon with highly irregular power. The effect in the long term was to alter the nature of Berlin, from being the industrial powerhouse that it had been since the nineteenth century to being a city devoid of industry in the late twentieth.

Two things were important for the dignity of the new helots, particularly the women: hairstyling and flowers. Margret Boveri took pride in the flower arrangements she created in her bombed-out house. During the Berlin Blitz, there had been hairdressers on hand in the flak towers ready to groom the women until the all-clear sounded. Fuel was another problem. With time the Berlin parks - the Tiergarten and the massive Grunewald - would be shorn of their flora. Even in the summer of 1945 the Grunewald was being cleared of fallen branches, while others looked for blackened beams in the burned-out buildings.
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Electricity was restored on 25 July, however, and on 5 August a limited postal service began to function. Berlin was no longer isolated from the rest of Germany. But the agony was not over. After the blights of murder, rape and starvation came disease: by mid-June a hundred Berliners a day were dying of typhus and paratyphus carried by human lice, and Berliners were forbidden from entering premises commandeered by the Western Allies.
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The Arrival of the Western Allies

Everyone waited for the Western Allies in the hope that their arrival would improve matters. Stalin, however, was playing for time so that he might remove anything valuable from the city, and sink trusty communists deep into any positions of power. Had he been able to renege on the deal to allow the Anglo-Americans in, he would have done so. Soviet permission to proceed to Berlin hung on the Western Allies retreating to the demarcation lines drawn up at Yalta. The Anglo-Americans were to fall back behind the Elbe.
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On 2 June Lieutenant-General Lucius Clay, who was to head the American mission in Berlin, had yet to receive instructions. The Americans’ first attempt to reach Berlin failed utterly. On 17 June Colonel Frank Howley left with a reconnaissance party of 500 men in a hundred vehicles. He was well prepared. Behind him he had left a pool of 2,000 college-educated Berlin women who were to be his secretariat in the city and he had acquired a Horch Roadmaster - Germany’s best car - and draped it with the Stars and Stripes. As he crossed the Elbe at Dessau in his Horsch the Soviet authorities insisted he reduce his train and continue with just thirty-seven officers in fifty vehicles. The convoy, Howley later wrote, reached ‘Babelsburg [
sic
] . . . a sort of German Hollywood’ near Potsdam under Soviet escort where it was forced to stop and eventually return to the west. Howley was allowed to go up and look at the future American airfield at Tempelhof. No one else had been permitted to leave their cars.
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Howley went back to a Schloss near Halle and sulked. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told his officers, ‘we are never going to Berlin.’
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On 29 June Clay and his British counterpart General Sir Ronald Weeks and the civilian advisers Robert Murphy and Sir William Strang landed in Berlin to discuss arrangements with Marshal Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov. At that meeting the frail land lines were established that were to become the Allied routes to the city until 1989. Howley made another attempt to reach Berlin on 1 July with 85 officers and 136 men. This time he got through - although the Russians made him less than welcome when he started putting up the Stars and Stripes in the American Sector.

Howley says the Americans celebrated their arrival with a fist-fight with the Russians in a restaurant: a Polish American major apparently floored six of his Russian allies.
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Attitudes were clearly beginning to change: the Germans did not seem such a bad lot after all, and the Russians were not exactly the sort of people you wanted to have as allies. Summing up his initial feelings about them in 1945, Howley was to recall that he had thought of them as ‘big, jolly, balalaika-playing fellows, who drank prodigious quantities of vodka and liked to wrestle in the drawing room’.
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The British too made a move on 1 July, only to be told that Magdeburg Bridge was closed. They found another bridge and slipped into Berlin, but a full entry was still delayed until the 4th. Officers later recalled the shock of seeing the lakes in the prosperous west filled with the corpses of women who had committed suicide after being raped. It was weeks before the Anglo-Americans achieved a real military presence, even if Ruth Friedrich reported seeing an American in the Schlossstrasse in Steglitz on 3 July.
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The main force of the Anglo-Americans arrived on Friday 6 July after withdrawing their troops from the disputed parts of Saxony, Thuringia and Mecklenburg - much to the chagrin of their inhabitants. The Control Council had been created in November 1944, and its seat was to be a ‘jointly occupied’ Berlin. As yet no one knew how that was to be managed. Would there be checkpoints between the sectors? Were Berliners to be issued with passports?
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It was agreed that the presidency of the Kommandatura would be rotated. Zhukov allegedly informed the Americans that he would not guarantee food for the Berliners, but visitors to the Allied conferences were well looked after. The Soviet marshal claimed that twice as many officers attended the Russian-hosted meetings because of the quantities of caviar and vodka that were laid out. This feast was apparently known euphemistically as ‘tea’.
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Howley relates that the Americans were much taken up with the abuse of Berlin women by the Russians, conveniently forgetting the widespread incidence of rape by American soldiers. A Russian general excused his countrymen, admitting that the rapes had done his country’s reputation no good, but it was nothing to what the Germans had done in his country. As the Russians had had Berlin to themselves for two months, they had haunts in the American Sector they were loath to give up. On one of these expeditions a girl was killed by some Russian sailors. The Americans complained, but the Russian commander told them there were no Russian sailors in Berlin: they had to be bad Germans in stolen Russian uniforms. The atmosphere grew tense. The Americans self-righteously decided that they were allowed to shoot to kill when women were involved. Changing their tune, the Russians excused their conduct by suggesting the men had been drunk or that they were deserters. In an exchange of fire in a railway station, some Russians were killed. At this the Russians launched a complaint. They cited a British sergeant who had knocked a Russian’s teeth out and dumped him across the border. That was an appropriate chastisement; it was wrong to shoot. Howley claimed the shooting ceased with the end of Russian rape and looting.
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In Berlin the Russians received the more populous working-class areas to the east, while the Western Allies carved up the richer districts to the west. There were enclaves and exclaves: the radio station was in the British Sector, but remained in Soviet hands; and the village of Steinstücken was included in Berlin. There were other anomalies that persisted until 1989: the Soviets had to be able to tend their war memorial in the Tiergarten, and each army had the right to monitor the others, which meant issuing passes to one or two privileged intelligence men who had the right to roam in a Western or Eastern sector or zone.

The Americans proved a disappointment. The Berliners had the feeling that they did not know why they were there. Margret Boveri, who had worked as a journalist in the United States and had been interned there at the beginning of the war, discovered that many of them spoke less English than she did. It was better to speak Spanish. Sometimes a little French helped. Other women were initially relieved that they could sleep in peace - unbothered by Russian interlopers; but, if that was true in the main, there were exceptions on both sides. Margret Boveri recounts the case of an estate-owning family on the edge of Berlin who were out walking when the Russians arrived and so ran back to the house petrified with fear as to what the soldiers would do to their daughters and their friends. They found to their surprise that the Russians had touched nothing and had been exceptionally polite. When the Americans arrived, however, one of the girls was so brutally raped that it took her years to recover from the shock. In general, however, Margret Boveri thought that whatever occupying army controlled your sector was the worst in the eyes of the Berliners. Every inhabitant envied the soldiers of their neighbours. The Americans were particularly naive. Dr Hussels, medical chief for Zehlendorf, was asked to provide 2,500 beds. She asked where they thought she could find them. The officer replied, in the hospitals. She had to inform him that the Russians had already taken them.
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