After the Reich (38 page)

They dressed from the pile, lucky to find something of their own. Then they had to sign the book that their money and valuables had been lawfully deposited. Libussa managed to steal a bit back while the attention of the official at the desk wandered over to two women stripping on the far side of the room. As they left, more militiamen examined them by lantern light, sizing them up. Fearing the worst, Libussa escaped through a window and hid in a ruined tank until dawn. Then she saw her fellow passengers coming out of the sugar factory. She caught up with them as they marched back towards the railway line. They had been robbed of all but a few rags. Women were sobbing hysterically. There was a train, and an old-fashioned German conductor in a uniform with a cap: ‘All right, it’s all right, everything’s going to be all right . . . Climb aboard please, all aboard, we’re leaving soon, going home.’
¹²⁰
The refugees admitted they no longer had money for tickets. The conductor assured them that this time it was free. The train took them to Angemünde, where they all had to get out. A Russian gave Libussa a piece of bread. Then a new train was put together to take them to Berlin.

Libussa von Krockow’s experience was not the worst. The refugees were often packed so tightly that they could not move to defecate and emerged from the trucks covered in excrement. Many were dead on arrival.
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During the winter months the near-naked expellees literally froze to death. Women went insane as they watched their children die and they had to be tied up with rope to prevent them from clawing the other passengers. When they arrived in the remains of Germany they tried to carry off the corpses of their infants; they didn’t want to believe they were dead.
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One of the Germans reported that her baby had been dashed against the wall as it had come between her and her rapist. Children had been robbed of their swaddling clothes and allowed to freeze to death.
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Libussa had still not had enough. At the end of March 1946, together with her friend Otti von Veltheim, she decided to go back and rescue the remaining members of her family. After crossing into the Russian Zone, they reached the comparative safety of Zehlendorf in the American Sector of Berlin. Near the old Stettin Station they found an East Prussian girl who had an impressive document in Russian that allowed her to go ‘home’, although where ‘home’ was was not stipulated. It cost them a packet of Luckies. There were no more friendly Russians in the railway station in Angermünde, just Russians with their minds on rape. Libussa and her friend escaped again. They found a friendly Russian commandant who assured them, ‘Poles bad. Very, very bad. But Russians good. Just ask Russians. Russians always help against Poles.’
¹²⁴

After an initial reluctance to countenance the trip, they had won over the reluctant German railwaymen who were due to drive the train to Stettin. It would be a chance to put one over the Poles. Potatoes stolen from the Russians were cooked up in the locomotive steam and after an hour or two the signals turned green and the train set off. The Russians tried their luck with the girls, but accepted their rejection manfully enough and carried on protecting them from the Poles until the train reached Stettin harbour and the sugar factory. The Russian lieutenant even escorted them past the Polish guards outside the free port, before leaving them to fend for themselves in the bombed-out city.

Stettin was not yet cleared of Germans. They could be recognised by the tatters that served as clothes and by their furtive looks. Libussa and Otti found an old lady who offered them a room and very soon after a purported Graf Heinrich Kinsky from Prague who was working as a lorry driver for the Poles. German POWs who were fitting up the building for the Polish authorities provided them with furniture, heat and bedding. The next morning, however, the count disappeared, never to return. They found a less fabulous lead in a Polish railway official from Posen, who had fought in the German army in the First World War and who had been in the Polish resistance in the Second. He obtained tickets for them to Stolp and issued them with a couple of Polish newspapers as camouflage.

The journey went relatively smoothly. When the militia arrived they feigned sleep. The only really tense moment came when they lit up their Luckies and the unfamiliar smell appeared to arouse suspicion among their Polish fellow travellers. One was bought off with a cigarette. The journey to Stolp, which had taken the Royal Prussian Railway a mere three and a half hours, took the new Polish authorities closer to ten. When the train reached the outskirts of the city, they panicked and rushed for the door. One of the passengers said to them in German, ‘Try the other side, Fräulein!’ The women froze, but the Poles in the carriage were laughing. In a chorus they said. ‘Auf wiedersehen!’
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Libussa waited for mid-summer to bring the rest of the family back to the ‘Reich’. By then a new administrator had arrived and gone to live in the manor house in Zipkow. The women found him courteous, and he spoke excellent German. Indeed, much was familiar in his office: the desk was from Libussa’s house and on the wall was a portrait of one of the Glowitz Puttkamers. The Pole asserted that the reason he had hung it there was that he numbered Puttkamers among his own forebears. Likewise Lehndorff was able to impress Polish officials that his family had once borne the name Mgowski, and he was issued with a pass in that name.
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The sympathetic - and aristocratic - Polish official had friends in the railways in Stolp. The mood was changing in Poland. A camp had been set up at Neu Torney near Stettin to process the refugees. Attacks on the trains had come to a complete halt, he maintained. The Germans from Pomerania were to be taken to the British or Soviet zones; most wanted to go to the latter. The British authorities were horrified by the physical state of the Germans when they reached the end of their journey. In April 1946 they issued a formal protest, and began to refuse to accept refugees under these conditions. In December they stopped accepting refugees altogether.

Whole villages were being shipped out now. They all had to wait at assembly points until the order came to join the train. The train Libussa and her family took required two days and two nights to travel the 237 kilometres to Stettin. They were allowed out at the stations, and there were indeed no attacks. The end of the journey was a DP camp. There Libussa found her friend Otti and her relatives, one of whom had already gone out of his mind. They spent three weeks in the camp.

When in mid-March 1946 Käthe von Normann heard that her deportation was nigh, it was time to pack and conceal the last remaining objects of value. Cushions were suspended from the rucksacks so that they could travel more comfortably in the cattle trucks, and a bucket was found, for the long hours in the train. A gold pin was hidden in a matchbox, rings wrapped in wool, necklaces sewn into bags or concealed in the food. A pearl necklace was rolled in oats, a wedding ring sewn into one of her son’s clothes.

They left on Good Friday. They walked to Greifenberg where they were taken to a camp beside the railway line. The train departed on Easter Sunday with some twenty refugees to a truck. Someone had the good idea of securing the doors with wire from the inside to prevent the bandits from opening it. This proved wise, because there were attempts to rip it open as the train went slowly. The Polish guards obliged them to sing. They opened up with ‘Eine feste Burg’. They came to Kreckow, a suburb of Stettin, whence it was a two-kilometre hike to the camp. They were driven on by militia men who threatened them with rubber truncheons. The following day they were all beaten on their way to the luggage inspection: ‘the children were beside themselves with terror’.
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At the counter the Pole failed to locate Frau von Normann’s remaining jewellery. They seemed more interested in the bacon that others were carrying. Leaving in May 1947, Hans Lehndorff seems to have had a reasonably easy time of it, or maybe it seemed like nothing after everything he had been through in the previous two years.

Käthe von Normann had suffered much, but possibly the greatest sufferers had been the East Prussians. One transport that left in 1945 crammed 4,500 people into forty-five cattle trucks. In the witnesses’ wagon there were 116 men, women and children. The train took eleven days to reach the new German border. During that time there was robbery upon robbery and two or three people died every day. The Poles did not just strip them of their possessions; they took the young girls as well.
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A third of the East Prussians were dead by the time they reached their homeland. On 28 October 1948 a survey was carried out among young East Prussian girls in Rüdersdorf camp. There were 1,600, most of them country girls who had been taken to Russia before being brought back to Germany. Between 50 and 60 per cent had died on the way, and more had perished since. Their average age was 19.7 years and their weight 45.38 kilos. Most no longer had monthly periods; 48 per cent had been raped, 20 per cent more than ten times and 4 per cent over a hundred times.
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Back in the train that night, plunderers descended on the Normanns and the other impotent refugees, trying to steal their cases. They waited two days and then were marched back to the station and driven back into the cattle trucks. The train set off towards Scheune, where Libussa von Krockow had had such terrible experiences. From there a train took them directly to Pöppendorf near Lübeck in the British Zone. The British Zone was also the principal destination for Silesians heading west.
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Nor was the search for valuables as draconian as it had been. When Libussa crossed the border for the second and last time she had managed to conceal some family effects in a false bottom to her daughter’s pram. The effects of camp food on the baby’s stomach had been so terrible that the official declined to search it. To their glee, the train took them to Lübeck in the British Zone. At Lübeck they arrived to find that tables had been set up under the trees and that hot soup was being served to adults and porridge and hot milk to children. Bananas were handed out to the children afterwards. One of them, suspicious of this novelty, refused: ‘What the farmer don’t know, he don’t eat.’
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It was the same treatment that Käthe von Normann had received. After all she had experienced, Frau von Normann was speechless. A British officer went between the tables offering seconds. The women were so unused to this solicitude that they burst into tears and tried to kiss his hand. It was not the satisfactory food that relieved them so much, but the feeling of security: ‘We were human beings again, and treated as human beings. Who can understand this feeling? To be honest, only those who had been through the many months of horror we had suffered, and from which we had now escaped.’
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PART II

Allied Zones

Prologue

G
ermany was formally divided into zones on 5 June 1945. They were of course clumsily drawn and certain industries became largely unworkable as a result. Spinning was in British Westphalia, but weaving was in Russian Saxony; cameras were made in the American Zone, but the optical glass came from the Soviet, and the shutters from the French; the Americans had 68 per cent of the car industry; while the Russians had all the kaolin needed to supply the various porcelain manufactures that were the pride of the old German
Residenzen
.
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They were very different parts of Germany. As far as the Western Allies were concerned, the joke ran round that the Americans had been given the scenery, the French the vines, and the British the ruins.
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The Allies squatted in their zones offering greater or lesser degrees of co-operation with their neighbours. The Anglo-Americans worked reasonably well together and, as comrades in arms, they went on to create Bizonia at the end of 1946 by uniting their zones. This became Trizonia when the French finally agreed to the merger. The French saw their piece of the German cake differently - almost as a conquered fiefdom. Naturally the Russians would brook no interference with their slice and their purposes were more similar to the French. What concord existed came at the meetings of the Allied Control Council in Berlin, which met for the first time on 30 July 1945 and issued its initial proclamation exactly a month later. The ACC convened three times a month, bringing together the four ‘elements’, as they were called, on the 10th, 20th and 30th at the old Kammergericht in the American Sector. During the Third Reich this was the seat of the notorious Volksgericht or People’s Court, which had tried offences against the state and had handed down huge numbers of death sentences.

After Potsdam the Kommandatura was set up in the Luisenstrasse in Berlin. It was the one Russian word that was palatable to all the Allies. That the Soviets took precedence was clear to all and sundry: the Western Allied flags had second place under a giant red star and hammer and sickle. The Russian commandant was General Gorbatov, while Zhukov’s chief of staff, General Sokolovsky, sat in on the meetings. The British representative was General Lyne. The spadework at the ACC was done by the deputy military governors or DMGs, leaving the governors proper to deal with their governments. Each meeting was chaired by a different power, which also provided the ‘light refreshments’ that followed. They generally were light, except when the Russians were the hosts. The first British DMGs were General Sir Ronald Weeks (who retired through ill-health in August 1945) and General Sir Brian Robertson. The French sent General Koeltz, followed by General Noiret. The governor, Pierre Koenig, came to Berlin ‘as seldom as possible’.
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Clay was the Americans’ emissary. The DMGs also regulated the work of the 175 different committees. A DMG typically spent the mid-week in Berlin and the weekends in the zone. It was different for the Soviets of course: Berlin was
in
their zone.