After the Reich (24 page)

The chief excitement was what could be gleaned from American dust-bins. Margret Boveri was working for the publishers Ullstein, where she came across a review of an American book that said the average American threw away more than the consumption of a Russian civilian. It was American policy that nothing should be given away and everything should be thrown away. So those German women who worked for the Americans were fantastically well fed, but could take nothing for their families or children. A woman who had put some cheese-parings on a windowsill to take home received a tremendous dressing down, and even the unfinished coffee was poured down the sink at the end of the day. The Americans were outraged that the starving Berliners should dare to help themselves to their food. Colonel Frank Howley had arrived in Berlin with a couple of tame wild boars the army had adopted on their drive east. When a German tried to eat one of the boars he was brutally knocked to the ground. Howley’s fellow officers, however, impressed on him that the boars were more trouble than they were worth, and the Americans ate both.
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Margret Boveri’s friend Elsbeth together with her sausage-dog Batzi came across a real treasure trove discarded in Grunewald. Bread of a whiteness Berliners had not seen for years, wrappers from butter and margarine packets, firm onions; but the Americans found out that someone had raided their refuse and were more careful after that. There were still finds to be made, however, and Elsbeth managed to live for five days on a rice pudding that she had filched out of an incinerator. That pudding had the makings of an epic. Margret Boveri was still singing its praises days later. Then she also received some chicken bones, and had the pleasure of making a soup with a little more body than the vegetable broth she more habitually used. The supreme delight, however, came when Fräulein Roscies found a half-eaten sponge cake and a dish of a sort of ‘tapioca-white-bread pudding’ that contained half a squeezed lemon: ‘a proper, grown-on-a-tree lemon’. The eating of this plunder runs to a long paragraph in her account.
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Despite the largesse to be found in rubbish bins, there was still a considerable shortage in the third week of July. So far they had had no meat that month; it was the sixth week without fat and probably the twenty-fifth without milk or eggs. Margret Boveri consoled herself by picking some magnificent flowers and setting them up in her airy if smashed-up room. In 1950, Howley nonetheless claimed that the Americans were spending their time worrying about the subsistence of the Berliners. He criticised the Russian rye loaf, which required 100 lb of flour to make 145 lb of bread. It was too wet, he said, and rotted.
^aw
It is somehow unconvincing, in the light of later events at least, when Howley reports a conversation with the French colonel Dalade in which he asks whether food can be political. The Frenchman replies, ‘Of course!’ Howley and the Americans were already fully immersed in the war for hearts and minds, and started teaching Berlin children baseball and basketball.
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The refusal to look kindly on the starving Berliners was part of the same policy that forbade ‘frat’ or socialising with the enemy. Initially frat was punishable by six months’ imprisonment. Soldiers were forbidden to shake German hands or give presents and were to treat them as a conquered race. Very soon the Americans in particular were out in pursuit of ‘Fräuleins’, and there were a few curiosities to see. The wife of a former foreign minister, Frau Solf, for example, who had been condemned to death by the Nazis for having operated an oppositional salon and spent over a year in Ravensbrück, began to receive visits from the British and the Americans; but, although she was no more than skin and bone, they brought her nothing to eat.
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The Anglo-American policy on frat stood in sharp contrast with the Russian one, whereby contact with the civilian population was informally permitted as a reward for the one and a punishment for the other. Some Berliners believed that the Russian policy was kinder than the ostracism decreed by the Anglo-Americans. Some even went so far as to say that the Berlin women had been relieved by their attentions - they had been so long deprived of their own menfolk.

Treating the Berliners like a conquered people engendered sympathy for the former Nazis. No distinction was to be made between good Germans and bad Germans, so the good Germans began to muck in with the bad. In some cases only the names had changed. The
Blockwart
, the resident sneak, of Nazi times had briefly reappeared as the
Hausobmann
. Margret Boveri’s emerged with the denazification questionnaire, the
Fragebogen
, in his hand, crippled with anxiety at the thought that the authorities would discover he had been a Pg. Ruth Friedrich was stormed by ex-Nazis asking for testimonials that they had helped Jews.
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When the people had joined the Party as a matter of routine, of officious lip-service, even anti-Nazis were prepared to help them.

Worse than the ban on frat was the requisitioning of houses in the smarter western suburbs such as Zehlendorf and Dahlem. This was the American Sector, and the area where there were the most comfortable villas. The US authorities even briefly requisitioned the Titania Palast as an officers’ club until Leo Borchard succeeded in getting it back. The Muscovites took over big houses in a largely unscathed Pankow, while the top Soviet brass settled in Karlshorst. In total some 3,000 flats and houses had to be made available. ‘Whether anti-Nazi or pro-Nazi, whether rich or poor, whoever had to get out, had to go,’ wrote Ruth Friedrich.
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By the autumn of 1945 the Berliner’s living space was reduced to less than ten square metres.
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The French had finally pitched up after they were allotted a morsel of the British Sector in Reinickendorf and Wedding on 23 July, and found themselves a few nice villas in Frohnau, Wittenau and Tegel. The British came out of it the worst, as there were fewer palatial residences in Wilmersdorf or Spandau. Wherever, the grabbing of houses by the Allies led to acute misery on the part of the stricken population. Not even Jews who had returned from the camps were immune and were thrown out at pistol-point. The victims were given a few hours to pack up their things. The result was that they had to find some space in a friend’s flat until that too was grabbed by another officer of the garrison. Meanwhile, women who had once led a privileged life in Germany struggled to find a place as a servant or cleaner to the invaders. One Berliner who had been kicked out of his house commented bitterly that first the women had been raped by the Russians, now they had to wait on the Americans’ whores.
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Despite their superior airs the Americans wanted to be greeted as liberators and resented the fact that they were not. Their cold-blooded approach contrasted strongly with that of the Russians.

Preaching in Dahlem in July the anti-Nazi theologian Otto Dibelius drew attention to the mortality figures for Berlin. In normal times, the daily rate was around 200; in the war it had risen to nearer 250 as a result of the bombing; now the figure was around 1,000, and this in a far smaller city. The famine was becoming acute. People, chiefly men, were falling like flies. The final killing spree and the high mortality rate after the cessation of hostilities meant that there were lots of dead to bury. There was nowhere to put them and no coffins, and the Allies would not help. Families had interred their loved ones in the ruins or laid them out in mortuary chapels. Berliners resorted to using large wooden cupboards or simply wrapping the body in a horse blanket tied up with cord. Ruth Friedrich records seeing an instance of this: a bundle with a pair of yellow, wooden-seeming feet protruding from the end.
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All over the city there were
ad hoc
graveyards. In front of the cinema opposite the Woman there was a collection of crosses. The first to be buried there was a girl who had leaped from a third-storey window to avoid being raped. Fresh crosses began to appear soon after.
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Questioned, the Russian general Gorbatov said the famine was the result of the Nazis, who had sabotaged supplies.
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The Honeymoon is Over

At the beginning there was some feeling of community among the victorious Allies. Frank Howley, who liked to think he had understood the Russians’ bad faith from the first, cites his superior officer Clay saying naively, ‘I like Sokolovsky [the Soviet assistant commander], he wouldn’t lie to me.’
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It didn’t take long for the Allies to fall out, not only causing friction between the soldiers, but also creating a danger for Germans who showed too much sympathy for one or other of their conquerors. A German who worked for the Russians was likely to be harried or imprisoned by the Americans. Germans who threw in their lot with the Americans needed to be careful when they entered the Russian Sector.

A tragedy occurred on 23 August that highlighted the fickle relations between the Allies and the difficulty in bringing culture back to the shattered city. Leo Borchard, the first post-war conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was shot by an over-zealous American sentry. The orchestra’s chief conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, had fled to Switzerland at the end of the war, and the Western powers had banned him from the stage. His crime was to have performed before Hitler, both in Berlin and at Bayreuth, despite his early resistance to the cultural policies of the Third Reich. During the war Borchard been a part of an underground resistance group called Onkel Emil. He had managed to charm the Soviet authorities by speaking their language (he was born in St Petersburg). Having obtained the Russians’ trust, on 12 May he cycled across Berlin with his friends to have a look at the Philharmonie Concert Hall. He was going to steal a march on Furtwängler and take advantage of his Swiss exile to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic. Ruth Friedrich wondered if Furtwängler had ever pitched up at the concert hall like this. ‘A gruesome still life revealed itself among the shattered arcades’ - where Bruno Walter (and more recently Furtwängler) had once directed the orchestra, there lay a dead horse.
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Borchard knew how to deal with the Soviets. He obtained larger rations for the Philharmonic’s musicians: ‘you can’t blow a trumpet with a rumbling stomach’.
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By 26 May he was performing Mozart, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Mendelssohn’s incidental music to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in the Titania Palast to an audience of starving, ragged Berliners.
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He conducted the orchestra twenty-two times before his death. That fateful Thursday he and his mistress, Ruth Friedrich, had been invited to dinner with a music-loving British colonel. It had been a real treat: sandwiches made from white bread filled with proper meat, and whisky. They talked passionately about Bach, so much so that they missed the curfew which came into force at 11 p.m. The colonel decided to drive them home himself. The night before there had been shots exchanged between Russian and American soldiers, and the Americans had issued orders to stop all cars heading towards the Eastern Sector. The sentry failed to notice that the vehicle was British because the headlights were too bright and signalled the colonel to stop as he drove under the S-Bahn bridge towards the Bundesplatz. He had meant to aim at the tyres, but managed to shoot Borchard through the head. He was killed instantly.
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Autumn 1945

Berliners had got used to conditions in their city by September, but it came as a shock to others, especially those who had enjoyed relative prosperity in the south-west. Ursula von Kardorff finally made it back to Berlin at the beginning of the autumn, having left in February. Food was very scarce, and the people shared the same, half-mad look as a result of their experiences since the Russian conquest. She stayed with her friend Bärchen on the Savigny Platz, in a room without an outside wall. Berliners called such buildings
Sperlings-Lust
, or ‘Sparrows’ Delight’, because at any moment you might take off into thin air. She went out on the Kurfürstendamm. The ban on frat was not being closely observed: she noticed elegantly dressed German girls milling around the American, British and French soldiers. There was jazz playing in establishments offering hot drinks but no solid food.

Ursula von Kardorff borrowed a bicycle to look at the city centre. The Wilhelmstrasse had vanished, the Foreign Office was just a ruin. Only the ProMi was still undamaged. On the Pariser Platz the Adlon Hotel was a burned-out shell. Her own house had collapsed. On the square there was a huge statue of Stalin.

The two guardhouses flanking the Brandenburg Gate were piles of rubble. Soldiers from the four powers walked around adding a living aspect to the landscape of ruin. Around the Reichstag building a black market had grown up. There were Russian graves on the Ranke Platz and abandoned tanks on the pavements. The latter served as kiosks, announcing dance schools, new theatres and newspapers and toys for urchins reminiscent of the pictures by Heinrich Zille. The Franziskus Hospital was the only undamaged building, and the nuns looked timeless in their habits, as if they had emerged from somewhere on the Castilian
Meseta
. Near by, the Tiergarten was a blackened shambles, looking more like a battlefield than a landscaped garden.

Fräulein von Kardorff ran into a former colleague from the
DAZ
(
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
) newspaper, Ludwig Fiedler, who told her a typical story. At the end of the war he had been drafted into the Volkssturm, or home guard, like any other man between fifteen and sixty. This last remaining human material was charged with defending Germany in a
guerre à l’outrance.
In the ruins of the pub Gruban und Souchay, he had come up against a Russian officer who was about to shoot him. Fiedler had produced some ‘disgustingly sweet’ schnapps and the Russian and he had sat down in the middle of the battle and got drunk. The Russian was so befuddled that he began to kiss his German enemy, then he wanted to kill him again, then he was so drunk that he forgot all about it.
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