After the Reich (39 page)

6

Life in the Russian Zone

Die Preise hoch
Die Läden fest geschlossen.
Die Not marchiert mit ruhig festen Schritt.
Es hungern nur die kleinen Volksgenossen,
Die grossen hungern nur im Geiste mit.
Komm, Wilhelm Pieck, sei unser Gast
Und geb, was Du uns versprochen hast.
Nicht nur Rüben, Kraut und Kohl
Sondern was Du isst, und Herr Grotewohl.

The prices high
The shops are firmly shuttered
Famine looms with steady marching pace
Only poor comrades eat their bread unbuttered,
The bigwigs are quick to stuff their face.
Come Bill Pieck, and be a gent:
Give us some of what the Party’s sent.
Not just turnips, swedes and weeds
But the things old Grotewohl thinks he needs.

Popular song. Quoted in Norman M. Naimark,
The Russians in Germany - A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949
, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1995, 389-90

T
he Russians created their occupation zone or SVAG on 9 June 1945. Even after they had ceded a large part of their zone to the Poles the Soviet authorities could congratulate themselves: they had done well. They had just under a quarter of Germany’s pre-war industrial base; 50 per cent of the country’s 1936 tool production; 82 per cent of office-machine manufacture; 68 per cent of textile machines and 25 per cent of car production. They controlled 24 per cent of the population, but - alas - only 2.2 per cent of the coal. This was the sticking point at Potsdam, which had failed to iron out the differences between the Allies.
¹

The Soviet authorities quietly established a civilian regime in their zone on 27 July, appointing German civilians to ministerial portfolios in transport, finance and industry. Stalin was careful not to go too far, and antagonise his new subjects. From the start there were hearts and minds to be won. He had told his satraps that they were to create national fronts with bourgeois parties even though their own system only allowed for a one-party state. Communists in Germany were to talk of ‘democracy’, not of socialism. He was pragmatic on the question of satellite regimes in Germany or Austria: perhaps they would come with time. He was torn, however, between the idea of a satellite state in eastern Germany and his desire to get his hands on the Ruhr. He overestimated the ‘anti-fascists’ and underestimated the lure of Bizonia. He restrained Tito and the Greek communists who he thought would endanger good relations with the West. It was not the same in Poland, which he wished to control without interference from his wartime allies.
²

Marshal Zhukov was placed at the head of the administration in Karlshorst - ‘the Berlin Kremlin’ - assisted by his deputies Sokolovsky and Serov. S. I. Tulpanov (‘the Colonel’ or ‘the Tulip’) was placed in charge of propaganda, but he was an economist by training - the Russian version of Ronald Weeks. The Russians spread themselves out in the old military engineering school. The intelligence officer Gregory Klimov says that his boss, General Shabalin, had a desk ‘the size of a football field’.
^bp
Zhukov liked to see himself as a friend to the Germans. Unlike many German communists, he made no attempt to deny the rapes. He blamed them on the demoralisation of his troops, acts that were very different from the crimes perpetrated by the SS in Russia.
³
In the spring of 1946 Zhukov was replaced by Sokolovsky - the battle commander by a pen-pushing desk general. The Soviet commander had far less power than Lucius Clay and had to cope with Stalin’s whims. Stalin was ‘opaque’: his policy directions could be interpreted in a number of ways. It was not easy to know when he would intervene and in what way. Another problem the commander had to reckon with were the activities of the secret service organisations, the NKVD/MVD, the GPU and Smersh. These were independent of the military governor’s control. Smersh, for example, had the job of investigating German civilian employees.
⁴

The SBZ had a panoply of bewildering organs, including GlavPurkka in charge of political re-education which ran the newspapers and went into the POW camps to convince the soldiers of the need for socialism.
⁵
Under Stalin’s ‘divide and rule’ policy, it was always difficult to know who was in control. There were, for example, 70,000
demontagniki
. Klimov came across some strange Russian troops in weird uniforms, and learned that they were ‘dismantlers’: ‘They are all dressed up as colonels and lieutenant-colonels, but they’ve never been in the army in their life.’
⁶
The different Kommandaturas in Berlin, Dresden, Halle and Leipzig reflected the views of their commanding generals and were often at odds with one another. The Thuringian command, for example, was harsh, while the Saxon was liberal. The generals could be sacked and dishonoured on charges of degenerate behaviour. This normally meant keeping mistresses. From mid-1947 it was official policy that any general who was caught living with a German woman would be sent home. By this time all Jewish officers had returned to Russia, as their presence had been deemed inappropriate.
⁷

Colonel-General Nicholas Bersarin had something of a hero’s status for Berliners, doubtless helped by his untimely death in a motorcycle accident at the age of forty-one. He was credited with doing all he could to promote the rebuilding of the city. He made the production of mortar-producing Rüdersdorfer Kalkwerke available to Hans Scharoun as a personal gift and gave the architect considerable patronage. He also put the internationally famous surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch in charge of health, Furtwängler of music and Eduard Spranger of the university. Later the Americans arrested and imprisoned Spranger for a while in Wannsee. It was not the first time he had tasted food in gaol - he had been inside after the 20 July Plot - but this time no one could see a good reason for his arrest, except possibly that the Americans resented his attempts to revive university life in the Russian Sector. Bersarin was passionate about trotting, and revived the race-course at Karlshorst for his favourite sport. Before 1945 Karlshorst had been famous for its steeplechase. When Bersarin died red flags were hung at half-mast all over the city. Ruth Friedrich heard of his death from a paper-seller on the Potsdamer Platz. When she got home Leo Borchard told her it was a personal misfortune: ‘He promoted art like no other.’ His motorbike ran into an army lorry. The driver of the vehicle shot himself.
⁸

In the first days Jews and communists were deemed the most trustworthy administrators. Appointments were often capricious. The Russians would find some apparently uncorrupted soul and tell him, ‘You are now mayor!’
⁹
But it was not always easy to see who was uncorrupted, and a lot of criminals and thieves were placed in positions of authority. In several instances, writers were made mayors of the communes where they lived, and not necessarily communist ones. Rudolf Ditzen (better known as Hans Fallada, the author of the popular novel
Kleiner Mann was nun?
- Little Man, What Now?) was put in charge of Feldberg in Mecklenburg for eighteen months. His ex-wife had been raped by the Russians, but he told his constituents, ‘The Russians come as your friends.’ Günther Weisenborn was made mayor of Luckau after emerging from the local prison,
¹⁰
while another writer, Hans Lorbeer, became head man in Pieskeritz. When Margret Boveri went to Teupitz in the Spreewald at the beginning of May she found that the Russians had left a Herr Susmann in charge. He was above suspicion, being both a Jew and a communist, but that had not prevented the Russians from stealing his bicycle - three times - despite an official document stating that he needed it for his work.
¹¹

After Potsdam, the antipathies between the West and the East became more open. The British complained that the Russians had stolen half the railway lines to Hamburg and demanded that the second set be put back. In revenge the Russians plundered the trains and sealed the borders so hermetically that it cost RM100,000 to make the illicit crossing.

Once the dust had settled, the Russians’ stooges were ready to put through land reform - very largely on their own initiative. It was introduced in the autumn, and the big estates were broken up. Wolfgang Leonhard accompanied the leading German communist, Walter Ulbricht, on a trip to the country where he canvassed opinion. They stopped in a small village and Ulbricht addressed the inhabitants. The peasants responded with silence.
¹²
Some of these reforms appear to have been in conflict with Stalin’s instructions to play the communist card sparingly, but they proved popular with many Germans who had grown up believing the Junkers to be the embodiment of evil, and who also wanted their share of the land. The Russians were particularly hard on the nobles, setting fire to their manor houses and raping or killing the inhabitants. Margret Boveri assumed that the old Junker class was now extinct, and regretted it, as ‘there were a good many decent sorts among them’. Elvira von Zitzewitz, who belonged to one of the oldest Prussian families, had told her that her parents had been wiped out in Templin, and others of her Berlin acquaintance had a similar tale to tell.
¹³
While they were not exactly extinct, they had suffered. One study of under 9,000 Junkers showed that nearly 5,000 died fighting in the war, with another 1,500 killed in other circumstances in 1945. Fifty-eight had died after the 20 July Plot, leaving just over 2,000 survivors in May 1945. Of these another 500 died in detention and the same number committed suicide. Around 15 per cent survived to make their way to the West. Whole families resorted to suicide. In Mecklenburg, which had a reputation as the most feudal region of Germany, thirty noble families were destroyed in this way.
¹⁴

Owning lots of land could have you placed in one of the nastier Soviet camps on the island of Rügen. Initially this meant unseating the remainder of the East Elbian nobility whose lands lay west of the Oder and Neisse rivers, but the Russians might have been vaguely thinking of the need to find room for the refugees from the east. In official East German terminology, these were not
Flüchtlinge
(refugees) but
Umsiedler
(resettlers). The first agrarian law, passed on 3 October 1945, was an excuse for plunder: all estates over 100 hectares were to be sequestered. Another 7,000 people were thus made homeless in one fell swoop.
¹⁵
In 1946 the physical substance of what remained was more or less effaced, so that the Schloss or Herrenhaus that lay at the centre of the feudal village of old disappeared from the map - unless, that is, some other use could be found for it as a club for Party functionaries or secret policemen, a mental hospital or a home for handicapped children.
¹⁶

As one recent historian has written, the Junkers played ‘a central role in the demonology of the Nazi regime’. The Russians equated them with Nazis, and their German stooges made sure agrarian reform was at the top of the agenda. Communist Party chairman Wilhelm Pieck coined the phrase ‘Junkerland in Bauernhand’ (The gentry’s lands in the peasants’ hands).
¹⁷
By 1947 there were 477,000 peasants tilling the new
kolkhoz
farms.
¹⁸
Some people refused to heed the signs. One of these was Hans-Hasso von Veltheim, a cosmopolitan intellectual with friends in high places around the globe. He lived in his country house, Ostrau, near Halle. It was the Americans who were the first to ‘liberate’ him. They placed a guard of honour on his land. When the Soviet army took over, they too accorded Veltheim the honour of a guard and offered him a professorship at the University of Halle. He declined. He had refused to believe he was in danger before the authorities grabbed his land. Now, extremely ill, he decided the time had come to flee to the West, rather than end up dying in prison like other landowners. He had looked on while a mob, whipped up by the Russians, pulled down the ancient trees in his park and broke open the coffins of his ancestors to hang the skeletons from the branches.
¹⁹
Those who, like the Grand Duchess of Weimar, threatened to resist the impounding of all their worldly goods were threatened with the Russians. Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein’s uncle Prince Günter von Schönburg-Waldenburg was not only robbed, he was packed off to Rügen. Many of them died from hunger and brutality. When Prince Günter finally escaped to the West he started a new life as a language teacher.
²⁰
Once the nobles quit their houses they were festooned with congratulatory banners: ‘Junkerland im Bauernhand’.
²¹

The Soviet authorities were not merely destructive; nor were they only thieves and rapists. Money was reintroduced as early as 8 May and - in theory at least - Soviet soldiers had to stop pillaging and pay for their purchases.
²²
The work of clearing the rubble in the towns and cities may have been a punishment, but there was sense behind it: only once the smashed bricks and mortar were cleared could communications be restored. In the first nine months of their occupation of Berlin, the Soviets restored nearly 200,000 homes. In this they had the support and assistance of Scharoun. They put back the tramlines, and the S-Bahn reopened as early as 30 May.

The Russians began to promote the arts in Berlin that same month by creating a Kammer der Kunstschaffenden or Academy of Creative Artists under the presidency of actor-director and star of
Der Golem
Paul Wegener. The Academy had departments dealing with music, writing, theatre and cinema. It had its own ‘star chamber’ with powers to rehabilitate National Socialists.
²³