Berlin at War (30 page)

the south of the city, and one for women at Fehrbellin, to the north-

west. The best known, however, was that at Wuhlheide. Set up in

April 1940 in the south-eastern suburbs of the capital – not far from

the transit camp at Wilhelmshagen – Wuhlheide had been one of the

very first AELs established in Nazi Germany. The five hundred or so

prisoners held there – who were primarily employed repairing Berlin’s

railways – were generally sent for a twenty-one-day sentence, but could

face a maximum of eight weeks.

Dutchman Willem de Wit was barely eighteen when he came to

Wuhlheide, following a fourteen-day interrogation by the Gestapo. After

a savage beating on his arrival, all his belongings were taken from him.

He was then allocated a number and a ‘uniform’ that consisted of old,

patched clothes. He would soon learn that there was a strict hierarchy

among the prisoners:

In the barrack . . . there were three steel beds on top of one another.

New arrivals slept on the floor for a week, then one was promoted and

could sleep on a wooden bench. Next, one could sleep on the bunk.

In the barrack, I was beaten again by the guard, as he thought I had

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berlin at war

brought lice in . . . Sometimes we were beaten up at night, when the

guards were drunk.45

Such violence was all-pervasive. A German inmate recalled seeing a

Polish prisoner who had made a number of escape attempts singled

out for especially hard treatment: ‘he received numerous brutal blows.

And later . . . he was beaten further with a rubber truncheon. The

next day, he was dead.’46

The other AELs in the Berlin district were no less brutal. Another

Dutchman remembered when one of his fellow labourers returned

from a stint in AEL Grossbeeren, after an escape attempt: ‘the little

lad became so thin that he looked like a skeleton. For six weeks, they

had mistreated and beaten him. He had become completely

apathetic.’47

Fortunately, the stay was limited. At the end of their sentence,

inmates were released and returned to their regular place of work,

but not before being required to sign a form stating that they had

been well treated and being warned that the next time they mis -

behaved they would end up in a concentration camp.48 For most, the

experience was enough. Word of the AELs at Wuhlheide, Grossbeeren

and Fehrbellin quickly spread among the foreign labourers.49 One

Dutch labourer recalled that, at her factory, workers who stepped out

of line were threatened with the single word ‘Wuhlheide’.50 Wuhlheide

is estimated to have seen some 30,000 prisoners pass through its

gates over the course of the war. Of these, it is thought that one

in ten perished.51

Although they were rarely mentioned by diarists and contemporaries,

forced labourers were ubiquitous in wartime Berlin. Every district of

the capital – from Adlershof to Zehlendorf – would have seen barrack

blocks, barbed wire and columns of sullen, ill-nourished labourers. At

their peak in 1944, Berlin’s 400,000 forced labourers made up over one

in ten of the population of the German capital. Though they were

largely concealed from public view, they would nonetheless have been

hard to miss.

Moreover, as the war turned against Germany from the end of 1943,

and the Allied bombing of the capital intensified, forced labourers increas-

ingly found their barracks and places of work damaged or destroyed.

unwelcome strangers

131

As a result, some were forced to live rough on the capital’s streets,

surviving from barter, begging and the black market. For ordinary

Berliners, therefore, their presence was increasingly difficult to ignore.

The writer Felix Hartlaub wrote to his father in the autumn of 1944,

describing the effect of ‘the foreign element’ in the capital:

In some streets and districts one really hears not a single word of

German and so has the feeling of strolling through a peculiar Babylon;

a Babel of rubble, and labour and tremendous expectation . . . In some

areas, in which hardly any of the street signs are still standing, one gets

a whiff of the atmosphere of the Parisian
banlieue
, the Italian piazza, or the Ukrainian village square.52

When Ursula von Kardorff was forced into the bowels of the

Friedrichstrasse Station during an air raid that winter, she was aston-

ished by the multinational underworld that seemed to inhabit the

tunnels:

Down there, it’s like I imagine Shanghai to be. Tattered figures in padded

jackets with the high cheekbones of the Slavs, between them, white

blonde Danes and Norwegians, coquettishly dressed Frenchwomen, Poles

with hate in their eyes, pale, freezing Italians – a mixture of peoples such

as has probably never been seen in a German city.53

And yet, for all that apparent omnipresence, Berlin’s foreign labourers

existed in a curious legal, political and social demi-monde between

toleration and persecution, between the strictures of Nazi racial policy

and the necessities of the German economy.

It should not be forgotten that German civilians had been exposed

to years of highly effective propaganda, which constantly told them

that most foreigners were racially inferior to them. In some cases, and

especially where the
Ostarbeiter
were concerned, such inequality could

take extreme forms. As one Berliner recalled, ‘To us, the Russians were

not people.’54 While such attitudes may indeed have been a response

to Nazi propaganda, they also stemmed from witnessing the brutal

treatment meted out to those deemed ‘subhuman’: the worse such

individuals were treated, the less they resembled human beings. Thus

the propaganda became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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berlin at war

With forced labourers living and working in their midst, the Berlin

public seems to have developed a curiously myopic indifference; a

desire to avert their gaze, ask no questions, keep their heads down.

This attitude was summed up by another Berliner, living close to the

transit camp at Wilhelmshagen, who recalled that the local inhab itants

advised ‘that one should make a detour around it’.55 On one level,

Berlin civilians facing rationing, the blackout and air raids had little

energy left to worry about the fate of foreign labourers. Moreover,

they were living under a dictatorship, and most were well aware of

the perils of stepping out of line and of asking difficult questions.

Hence the myopia was often tactical.

For many, this indifference was tinged with mistrust and resent-

ment. It was relatively easy to conflate foreign labourers – even those

who had volunteered – with prisoners of war and concentration camp

inmates. After all, in many cases they looked the same, and could

sometimes be seen working alongside one another. The assumption

was reinforced by the Nazi habit of referring to all such individuals

as ‘criminals’, regardless of their precise origin.56 This attitude is well

illustrated by the recollections of one Berliner, who remembered the

female prisoners of the AEL at Fehrbellin, close to his home, north-

west of Berlin: ‘it was very well known that there was a camp there’,

he said, ‘but the population had been told that it was a work camp

and that the women were work-shy and prostitutes. So no one was

bothered by it.’57

At the most basic level, this prejudice was made manifest by blaming

any theft, burglary or misdemeanour in the local area on ‘those in the

camp’. In the later period of the war, Wehrmacht mood reports were

full of complaints from the Berlin public about the behaviour of

‘foreigners’: concerns were aired about foreigners hanging around in

the suburbs, black-marketeering – ‘while German men and women

have to work hard’ – or that foreigners ‘received larger ration alloca-

tions than Germans’.58 In one report it was claimed that the renowned

Café Kranzler on the Kurfürstendamm had become such a hub for

the forced labourers that it was known locally as the ‘Gangsters’

Rendezvous’.59

Upstanding Germans, it seems, were also much distressed by the

apparent attraction that foreign workers held for Berlin’s womenfolk.

One report from January 1945 noted how ‘regrettable’ it was that

unwelcome strangers

133

‘German women sold their honour for a cigarette’ and how they ‘paid

no attention to their fellow Germans’ and instead ‘sit only with

the mostly well-dressed foreigners and later take them home’.60 More

comically, perhaps, one informant noted that foreigners showed dis -

respect during the newsreel show at a cinema close to Alexanderplatz:

‘[they] didn’t watch the newsreel at all’, he fumed. ‘[They] behaved

as if they were in a bar, some went, others arrived. References to

serious events in the newsreel were met with laughter.’61

More seriously, wild rumours began to circulate that foreign labourers

gave ‘light signals’ to the bombers during air raids, telling the crews

where to drop their bombs.62 In truth, there were numerous genuine

cases of theft, prostitution and petty crime that were attributed to the

forced labourers in the capital. In early 1944, a Czech labourer was

convicted of stealing twenty-one pairs of shoes during a night-time

break-in on a shoe shop in the Potsdamer Strasse; he was sentenced to

three years’ hard labour.63 Three Frenchmen, meanwhile, were arrested

in December 1942 after they had stolen 20 kilos of butter and twenty

bottles of brandy. Though they claimed to have carried out the robbery

only to satisfy their own hunger, their pleas fell on deaf ears: all three

were sentenced to death.64

There were also more serious crimes. In 1943 two young foreign

labourers were executed in Plötzensee after being found guilty of the

murder of a young German woman. Under interrogation, it emerged

that the pair – a Belgian and a Frenchman – had intended to threaten

the woman and rob her, but had inadvertently killed her with their

first blow. They then threw her body from a train to make the death

look like a suicide or an accident.65 Cases such as this were widely

reported in the press, with the inevitable result that German Berliners

became ever more suspicious of the foreign labourers as unpredictable

and potentially violent ‘others’. Such sentiments could swiftly boil

over into violence and confrontation. One Dutchman recalled that

Berlin civilians, waiting on the city’s rail platforms, frequently ‘swore

and spat’ at foreign labourers working on the nearby tracks.66

Not everyone succumbed to the indifference, however, or to the xeno-

phobia. Some German civilians sought, where possible, to make life a

little easier for the forced labourers among them. One woman, for

instance, chose the rather perilous method of distributing bread and

water through the wire of a nearby camp to newly arrived prisoners.67

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berlin at war

Another example is that of Otto Langrock, a master-craftsman working

in the Volta factory in the north of the capital, who came to blows

with the factory’s director after a guard dog was let loose on a group

of Russian forced labourers. Though such an action would normally

have had serious consequences, Langrock was saved by his colleagues,

all of whom testified to his good character.68

Other Berliners understandably chose the less obvious and less

risky approach of attempting to improve the conditions of those who

were in their own employ, or whose lives they could directly influ-

ence. Memoirs and diaries contain many examples. One woman living

close to Wilhelmshagen was allocated a French labourer from the

camp to come and chop wood for her. She paid him in food, which

she divided up from her own ration allocation.69

Even strangers sometimes extended kindness to the workers. The

Ukrainian
Zwangsarbeiter
Larissa Safjanik recalled how, while clearing

rubble after a bombing raid, she had begged a passer-by for some bread:

‘She waved us aside and carried on. But after a few steps, she stopped

and bent down as if she was tying her shoelace. In fact, however, she

was placing a ration coupon under a stone. So, that day, I got a piece

of bread.’70 In another instance, Lidia Affanasjewna tried to sneak away

from the column of workers returning to their camp, so that she and

a friend could try to find some food. Finding a bakery, the two ‘asked

– with hearts beating in our chests – for a piece of bread. Behind us,

an elderly man and a woman entered the shop and closed the door

behind them. We were given food, and even a few rolls to take with

us.’71 It could be upon such small interventions that the lives of Berlin’s

forced labourers depended.

As the war ground on to its conclusion, a new emotion began to

overtake all others – fear. The presence of many thousands of foreigners

in the German capital – the vast majority of whom came from those

lands with whom Germany was at war – became cause for consider-

able concern. German civilians seem to have conflated the millions