After the Reich (41 page)

Worse than the full-scale removal of the industrial base of the land was the abduction of men and women to develop industry in the Soviet Union. Some of the more vital scientists had surrendered to the West; the scientists who had created the V1 and V2 missiles at Peenemünde, for example, gave themselves up to the Americans in Bavaria. The Russians also found some useful personnel and they were prepared to overlook a man’s Nazi past if the scientist were prepared to work for them. They also lured them over with the promise of better housing. Technicians working at the Oberspreewerk in the west were offered homes in Hirschgarten near Köpenick.
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At first the Russians were successful in attracting scientists. The Germans were less enthusiastic when the round-ups began. They took place two days after abortive elections on 20 October 1946, when the SED had been soundly beaten. Soldiers came at 3.00 a.m. to deport all the leading electricians, toolmakers and engineers. The men and women were informed, ‘By order of the Russian High Command you have been mobilised for work in the Soviet Union. You are to leave at once, with your family. Your furniture and personal belongings will be moved to your new residence. The length of your stay will not exceed five years.’
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The size of the operation meant that they had not finished by five that afternoon. One of the places the Russians cordoned off that morning was Hirschgarten.

The Russians were able to take their pick of the skilled workers from GEMA (which manufactured range-finders and sights), ETEM (which made guidance equipment), AEG Kabelwerk (which created radio transmitters), OKG-4 (which made automatic pilots) and Askania (the radar manufacturers). Some of the Germans refused to go. In Halle they literally had to be clubbed into submission. Ninety-two special trains were laid on to transport the 5,000 men, women and children. Some of them were indeed back within five years, some came back in 1953. A few stayed until January 1958, about the time the first Sputnik went into orbit. German scientists were the fathers of both missile programmes, American and Russian.
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The SBZ did not necessarily approve of the kidnapping of these vital workers, but they had no control over the military. An attempt was made to stop the dismantling of Zeiss and the Schott optical works, but it was to no avail.
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The Russians also seized Walter Riedel of the glassworks of that name in Czechoslovakia. Riedel had invented fibreglass and worked on lenses and prism glass. His large-size picture tubes were used by the Luftwaffe as monitoring devices during the war. The Russians deemed Riedel a scientific VIP and ‘invited’ him to go to Russia after the war. He worked in a laboratory for a decade before he was allowed to go home. His firm had been seized by the Czechs. His son, Claus, had escaped detention in Austria and with the help of the Swarovski family was able to start up the family business again in Tyrolean Kufstein.
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Until 1946 it was theoretically impossible to cross into the Russian Zone without an ‘Interzone Pass’. It was a risky business, not least because of the danger of arrest or, for women, of rape by border guards. Despite that many people braved the unmanned ‘Green Border’ in order to reach their families. Margret Boveri crossed to her native Franconia, and Ursula von Kardorff managed to make it from Berlin, despite being shot at by Russian border guards. Some guards were more accessible, and were bought off with bottles of schnapps. The first sight of Russian rule in the east came as a shock. Germans wishing to travel had to get used to sitting on the roofs of trains, while Russians in clean uniforms occupied the half-empty carriages. In tunnels you learned to lie flat and keep your head down. The station signs were written in Cyrillic script, and policemen’s hats were embellished with the red star.

The life of the Gulag could be experienced in the Erzgebirge on the Czech border. This was another part of Germany that had originally fallen to Patton’s soldiers. The Americans retreated to Mulde on 12 May, but the Russians were slow to take their places and did not get there before the end of June. The Russians learned that the region contained uranium ore. This was an important discovery as ‘the Kremlin urgently requires atom bombs for its peace policies’. Initially 10,000 men, later 20,000 men and women, were forced to work in the mines; many of them were ethnic Germans from Hungary who were driven to work with kicks and beatings, and cries of ‘Davai! Davai!’ (Come on, move). Some of the women were whipped.

At the beginning of 1947 the whole western half of the region was cordoned off. More and more forced labourers were brought in. Some 20,000-30,000 Saxons were not deemed enough and recruiting offices were set up throughout the SBZ to procure the 75,000 men the Russians felt they needed. POWs returning from the east were sent straight off to the Erzgebirge, where they lived in makeshift barracks and tent camps similar to the places they had just left. The camps were at a great distance from the mines, and the workers had to rise at 3 a.m. to start the three-hour journey to the pithead. The work brought the men into contact with carcinogenic material and 20,000 people are believed to have died prematurely as a result of working in the mines. As it was eight men died in one week. The results were positive for the Soviets, however: on 23 August 1949 they were able to detonate their first atom bomb, using uranium from the mines at Wismut.
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In May 1945 the purging and recreation of the police force was the most important item on the agenda. At first the force was dominated by unarmed Socialist Party members, as the Allies had stipulated that the Germans were not to be issued with weapons. This made them vulnerable to the bands of armed bandits. K-5 was the name of the political police which took over some of the functions of the Gestapo and would turn in time into the Ministry of State Security, or ‘Stasi’. The man behind it was Erich Mielke, a communist who had fled to Moscow after killing a policeman. There were already over 80,000 police in the SBZ by September 1947.
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If Mielke’s Stasi was to be the recreation of the Gestapo, another Nazi institution was to be rapidly dusted down and put back to work: the Hitler Youth. The youngish Erich Honecker was given the job of forming the FDJ, or Freie Deutsche Jugend.

Even more sinister were the many camps and prisons. Some of these had been simply carried over from Nazi times, like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. The Russian general Dratvin explained the facts to some British visitors: ‘The [Nazi] camps have been liquidated, but the buildings are being used for housing fascist criminals who have committed crimes against our country.’
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The traditional Nazi camps were joined by new creations like Hohenschönhausen in Berlin, which was also in a Soviet residential ghetto. It was here that Otto Grotewohl, SPD leader in the Soviet Zone, lived surrounded by Russians and barbed wire. Then there was Jamlitz was near Lieberose in the Uckermark, Forst in the Lausitz, Roitzsch-Bitterfeld, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Ketschendorf near Beeskow in the Mark, Neubrandenburg, Mühlberg on the Oder, Bautzen, Altenhain (which was used for Russian deserters and former members of Vlasov’s army), Stern-Buchholz near Schwerin and the old POW camp at Torgau which had been turned into a political prison. Hardened cases were transferred to the Soviet Union.

The new (and old) camps were called ‘Spetzlager’, or ‘special camps’. At Christmas 1946 there were 15,000 prisoners in Buchenwald and around 16,000 in Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen, or Spetzlager no. 7, was closed down in the early 1950s. Later fifty mass graves were discovered there which were thought to have been dug after the war, containing around 12,500 bodies. Most of the dead had perished from hunger or disease; about thirty-five to forty inmates died every day in the winter of 1946-7. Death began with the over-sixties, who perished from dropsy. When they had succumbed it was the turn of the fifty-year-olds. In the winter of 1946 to 1947 even the forty-somethings died in droves. Camp 3, Hohenschönhausen had about 3,000 prisoners, Fürstenwalde 6,000, and Camp 4, Bautzen 18,000. Russian estimates show that, of the 122,671 Germans who passed though the camps, 42,889 died - that is, more than a third. Only 756 were actually shot.
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German figures are roughly double the Russian tally: 240,000. Of these a higher figure of 95,643 perished - over 40 per cent. In these revisions there were 60,000 prisoners at Sachsenhausen, of whom just over half died; a little over 30,000 at Buchenwald, where a little under half did not survive the experience; and 30,000 at Bautzen, where 16,700 died.
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Anyone who was suspected of Nazi sympathies was liable to incarceration; and a good many monarchists and conservatives were thrown in too. The chief sugar manufacturers - twelve in all - were sent to a camp. One survived. Quite a lot of young people who had been in the Hitler Youth or the girls’ equivalent, the BdM, were sent to the camps. For the major landowners and Junkers there was Rügen.
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Added to the perils of life in the Russian concentration camp,
Nacht und Nebel
abductions had claimed another 5,431 Germans by November 1947, of whom 1,255 were youths.
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For all its dangers the Soviet Zone, like the Democratic Republic that succeeded it, offered a sort of daily life provided the citizen was not too demanding. There were times when the inhabitants of SBZ were better fed than the Germans in the West, but this did not prevent them from complaining, as in this parody of the nationalist anthem ‘Deutschland über alles’:

Deutschland, Deutschland, ohne
alles
Ohne Butter, ohne Fett
Und das bischen Marmelade
Frisst uns die Verwaltung weg.
Hände falten, Köpfe sinken,
Immer an die Einheit denken.

Germans, Germans lacking
everything
Lacking butter, lacking fat
The modicum of marmalade
Is mopped up by our brass hats.
Bow your head in humility,
Lie back, think of Unity.

Culture

Two heroic figures emerged in the Russian Zone to promote a brief flowering of the arts after May 1945. They were Johannes R. Becher and the Russian art historian Colonel Alexander Dymshitz. Becher was just behind the front line, ready to implement a policy elaborated in Moscow, but once again it was not necessarily an exclusively Marxist-Leninist approach. As early as 30 April 1945 Ulbricht issued a list of writers who were welcome to publish in the Soviet Zone. They were all exiles from Nazism: Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Zweig and Bertolt Brecht.
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The Russians actively promoted not just socialist theatre, ballet, opera and cinema; they promoted bourgeois arts as well. This was in keeping with Anton Ackermann’s programme penned in Moscow in June, that the Soviet system was wrong for Germany, and that it needed to be reorganised on broad, anti-fascist, democratic principles instead. The programme had to be in place before the Western Allies arrived for the meeting in Potsdam. For the first three years after the war, there were no real cultural divisions in the capital, and the Soviet Zone continued to take the lead in cultural matters.
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Becher returned to Berlin after twelve years and three months of exile on 11 June 1945. Ulbricht had approved his role; he was ‘necessary for the work among the intellectuals’.
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Becher found his house in Zehlendorf intact, if not quite habitable. He went off to live in Dahlem, in the home of the Nazi banker Emil Georg von Strauss. He immediately began to invite old friends over to discuss getting intellectual life going again in the city. This was to become the steering committee for the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany). It was meant to function in all four zones. Becher put down his thoughts on Berlin in a letter to his wife Lily, whom he had left behind in Moscow. ‘It is really enough to make you howl . . . and Berlin is Berlin. Despite everything you are not coming back to a strange place. Children sing German, mothers speak German - and the trees on the streets and the green on the balconies - I am
overjoyed
, my most beloved, and the only galling thing is that you are not beside me!’
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On 3 July the Alliance was launched at a party for 1,500 people in the hall of Broadcasting House in the Masurenallee. Becher spoke: ‘We have enough German tragedies in our history, more than enough, now we want to finally bring an end to German tragedies . . .’ In the next two years he went a long way towards creating that renewal until the Cold War made bourgeois writers unwelcome in the SBZ.

As the Allies prepared to celebrate their meeting in Potsdam, the Russians reopened the Variété Theatre and in a cinema opposite they screened the film
Dr Mamlock
. Where no specific building existed, the Russians turned over municipal premises to theatre and cinema. A triumphal arch had been set up in Berlin’s Frankfurter Allee, which was later to become one of the showpieces of Stalinist architecture. As part of the festivities Wilhelm Furtwängler gave a concert in which Mendelssohn’s music was played.
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All these events received the hearty approval of Bersarin. Few Berliners, however, knew they were happening. There were as yet no newspapers, and communication was by word of mouth.

The Soviet cultural supremo was Colonel Sergey Tulpanov, head of the Political Department of the Soviet Military Administration. He wanted to prove that the Russians were not quite as barbaric as May 1945 had seemed to suggest.
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They tended to look after the German artists and show them respect, while the Western Allies cavilled, treated them like unrepentant Nazis and refused to shake their hands. Tulpanov was a huge, ursine presence, whom George Clare compared to Hermann Göring, many of whose cultural offices Tulpanov had taken over. By April 1946 more than a hundred theatres had opened in the SBZ, performing classics such as Lessing’s
Nathan der Weise
, Molière’s
Tartuffe
and works by Offenbach, as well as Russian pieces. Tulpanov was abetted by Dymshitz. It was Dymshitz who was behind Die Möwe, the artists’ and writers’ club that opened in the old Bülow Palace in the Soviet Sector and provided literary and artistic Berliners with a decent meal, comfort and rest. Later they had the premises of the old Berlin Club that Becher turned into an artists’ colony with the parquet from Hitler’s Chancellery. Here authors ate unrationed food and kept out of the cold.
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