After the Reich (25 page)

One day Ursula von Kardorff went to see her aunt Kathinka, the wife of the politician Siegfried von Kardorff-Oheimb. She lived in an elegant villa near the Tiergarten that had miraculously retained some of its contents even if it too had lost part of the outer wall. They went to the Hotel Esplanade near by, the only grand hotel to have partially survived the war. Only one reception room survived. They had to pay a deposit of 80 marks for the knives and forks, because so many had been stolen. The potato soup they ate cost as much as an entire meal in the past.

After lunch they went to the Russian Sector as Aunt Kathinka wanted to visit her friend Friedrich Ebert, the corpulent, alcoholic son of the first Weimar president, and ‘a sort of Gauleiter of Brandenburg’ for the Russians. He looked shabby and hungry. He said he was envious of Ursula von Kardorff because she was going to return to Jettingen, ‘but I love this city so much that I want to help it’.
¹¹⁴

Everyone was tense in Berlin. People you hardly knew fell upon you with delight on seeing that you were still alive. Everyone was
Du
where in the past a strictly formal style of address was maintained in circles like Ursula von Kardorff’s. The theme of every conversation was who had survived. Someone had killed himself, but no, he had been arrested by the Gestapo or the GPU, or perhaps he made it to the British Zone. Another was shot by the SS because he had hoisted the white flag ten minutes too early. A third had been polished off by a drunken Russian because he could not provide him with alcohol. A fourth had spent several days with the GPU and had then been released. She heard stories that made her blood run cold; of Gerhard Starke, who was the liaison between her newspaper and the SD, and a man who had kept the authorities off their backs. He had been arrested by the Russians and condemned to die from a bullet in the head. His captors made him kneel, get up, kneel again, get up until finally they brought him to a door and opened it. He could scarper, while he still had the chance.

Old Graf Hardenberg, who had shot himself in the stomach after 20 July 1944, had found his way out of the concentration camp in Oranienburg where he was being held. Despite his terrible wounds he had fled and hidden in the woods, while the guards killed out of sheer spite anyone who might have contributed a positive element to a new Germany. It had been a miracle - the whole family had survived, even the son who had been punished by being sent to Courland where, as a result of Hitler’s pig-headedness, many divisions sat idly by until they were herded together by the Red Army and led into captivity. He had also chosen his moment to run.
¹¹⁵

At another time Ursula von Kardorff’s attempts to write were disturbed by the arrival of one of Bärchen’s cousins, with four little girls. She had arrived from Poland. The little boy had died on the way: ‘He looked like a little angel, a little angel,’ she repeated mechanically. The woman’s head was shaved, and she looked drawn and starving. The surviving children were covered in pus and lice. Bärchen washed, brushed, deloused and bandaged them one by one.

Renée Bédarida was a former
résistante
who had been sent to work in the administration of the French Sector. On 15 October she communicated some of her first impressions of the city to a friend in France. The Berliners were ‘dirty, badly dressed, and always carried a bag of potatoes or a bundle of kindling . . .’ The canal that runs along the Charlottenburg Chaussee ‘stank to high heaven of corpses’, and yet she thought the Germans were getting more meat than the French, even if she was shocked to see children begging for bread and chewing gum.
¹¹⁶

She made visits to the black markets in the Tiergarten and on the Alexanderplatz.
^ax
Five cigarettes procured a film for a camera or an iron cross. One of the opera houses was still standing and she went to see
Rigoletto
. She was amazed to find the Berlin women all dressed up in their finery: ‘how could these women dare to walk through Berlin dressed this way?’ With another French administrator she watched German POWs arrive at the Stettiner Bahnhof: ‘We felt disarmed, the temptation to despise them or hate them became impossible at the sight of these miserable people, they were also victims of Hitler’s madness.’
¹¹⁷

Renée lived in Frohnau in the French Sector. It had come through the war more or less unscathed, but the requisitioning of houses and rooms had created bad blood. The French were an odd and suspicious collection: there were old resistance hands, civil servants on secondment, ‘Vichy men hoping that France would forget about them who had come to wipe the slate clean on the other side of the Rhine, adventurers and profiteers’. The French perpetrated a few acts of childish spite: they mutilated a few inscriptions on the Siegessäule - or Victory Column - in the Tiergarten, which commemorated German triumph in the Franco-German War, and festooned it with French tricolours. In Schwanenwerder they found a fragment of the Tuileries Palace which had been burned down by the Paris Communards in 1871, and removed a high-minded panel that talked of the fate of nations.
¹¹⁸
The Germans themselves did not waste much time on the French - they realised they were second-division conquerors.
¹¹⁹

Libussa von Krockow arrived from Pomerania in February 1946. It had been two years since she had lived there, monitoring BBC broadcasts for Ribbentrop’s research bureau. She recognised the troglodyte dwellings of the Berliners by the stove pipes protruding from the ground. She was so dishevelled that the maid of one of her mother’s friends offered her a 50 Pfennig piece and slammed the door in her face. Her body finally gave way after her ordeal: she was ill for a week.
¹²⁰

Spring 1946

The military train delivered George Clare to Berlin in the spring of 1946. It had been a perishing winter with poor shelter. As it got progressively colder the lack of amenities had begun to pinch. Berliners collected wood from the ruins and bought candles on the black market. They scavenged for coal. Infant mortality stood at 80 to 90 per cent. As there was no glass in the windows, the cold wind came howling through the damaged buildings. Berliners still went in droves to see
Macbeth
when it was below zero in the auditorium. Lady Macbeth shivered with cold on the stage. At Christmas, there was no warmth, no presents and no tree.
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When the spring came a semblance of normality reappeared: there were excursions to the cherry orchards of Werder. A Russian stripped off and leaped into the waters of the Havel, excusing himself this time - it was ‘very hot’.
¹²²
Attitudes to the conquerors appeared to have changed. Clare, in British uniform, says the British were liked most. The ‘Tommies’ still exuded a feeling of fair play. The Americans -
die Amis
- came second. They were tougher and rougher and their Military Police was particularly feared. The French continued to be treated as something of a joke: conquerors who had played no part in the conquest.
Iwan
- the Russian soldier - was by now universally despised.
¹²³

It was not just fresh troops who arrived to restock the Allied garrisons, exiles gradually returned to look at the city they had once loved. Even more than a year after the cessation of hostilities, the post-war condition of Berlin had the power to shock Carl Zuckmayer. Writing to his wife Alice on 24 November 1946, Zuckmayer said the city was ‘unrecreatable and
almost
indescribable’.
¹²⁴
Some very different exiles flew in on 19 July 1947 when seven old Nazis returned to Berlin: the war criminals who had escaped the noose at Nuremberg were being flown to Spandau. Speer stared excitedly out of the window of the Dakota as it came in to land. He was able to discern the remains of his own contributions to the city: ‘the East-West Axis, which I had completed for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. Then I saw the Olympic stadium, with its obviously well-tended green lawns, and finally the Chancellery I had designed. It was still there. Although damaged by several direct hits. The trees of the Tiergarten had all been felled, so that at first I thought it was an airfield. The Grunewald and the Havel Lakes were untouched and beautiful as ever.’
¹²⁵
It would be twenty years before he was allowed a second look.

4

Expulsions from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia

On 4 May complete calm reigned. Even the three days of public mourning for the death of Hitler decreed by Secretary of State Frank passed everywhere without incident. You could never have supposed or expected that the Czechs, who had in the course of the war never dared offer even the slightest open resistance to the German armed forces, would descend into an unprecedented orgy of horror against defenceless people after the surrender, that spared neither helpless, wounded soldiers, women or children.

‘H.K.’, 21 June 1947. Quoted in Wilhelm Turnwald, ed., Dokumente zur Austreibung der Sudetendeutschen, Munich 1951, 18

T
he so-called Sudetenland and its German population had been one of the causes of the war. Hitler had taken up the complaints of the Sudetenländer: Bohemians and Moravians under the leadership of Konrad Henlein. Their mistreatment had prompted the Munich Agreement of September 1938, which ceded much of the border area to Germany, leaving the rest of the country defenceless. In the spring of 1939, German tanks rolled into Prague.

It is true that the Sudetenländer had their grievances. Former subjects of the Austrian Crown, their towns and villages formed a deep ring around the Czech lands. They also made up a large percentage of the populations of Prague and Brno (Brünn), Iglau and Zwittau. In Slovakia there were
Insel und Streudeutsche
(Island and Straw Germans); there were German communities in the Carpathian Mountains and a colony amounting to just under a third of the city of Pressburg or Bratislava. In Troppau they were wholly intermingled with the Slavs and spoke their own patois called
Slonzakische
, but in most areas they maintained a fierce division. They felt they had been duped at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in October 1919 when the Allies finally refused them a right to ‘self-determination’ as promised by President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
¹
Beneš, representing Czechoslovakia, had proclaimed that his state would be the ‘new Switzerland’ with minority rights ensured by a system of cantons. This never happened.
²
All German-speakers (including German-speaking Jews) were affected by the new state which cut them off from
their
capital, Vienna - from their businesses, government, friends and relations.
³

The West had granted the Czechs’ leader the historic Czech territory of Bohemia and Moravia, together with Slovakia. Over the centuries, however, huge numbers of Germans had settled in the Czech lands and Hungarians in the Slovak east. The Czechs became the political lords and masters of the new state, though they amounted to just 51 per cent of the population.
^ay
The Germans formed nearly a quarter, but the Slavic Slovaks could not be expected to side with them, so it would always be two against one. Conflict was ‘pre-programmed’.
⁴
There were even attempts to break up the German lands by planting Czech colonies.
^5
az

As grieving Germans were quick to point out, their numbers in Bohemia and Moravia were greater than the entire Norwegian people and almost the same as the Danes or the Finns. They had their political organisations: Henlein’s SdP, or Sudetenland Party, represented 68 per cent of the Germans, and was the biggest party in the Czechoslovak state. There was also the Sudetenland Socialist Party, which co-operated with the Czechs. If the Germans could never achieve any political clout, until recently, they still had topped the bill socially and financially - though many Germans had been hard hit by the Depression. The Czechs were employed in their businesses, on their farms. The nobility and captains of industry were German-speaking as were many lawyers and doctors. In 1945 there were many instances of farmworkers appropriating German farms, the junior doctors snatching the German practice, and the junior managers taking over German businesses - to some extent repeating the process that had taken place in 1938 when the Germans became top dogs again. There were cases of pure opportunism: Czechs, who had up till then moved in German circles, had German wives or German-speaking children, suddenly became the apostles of Czech nationalism and hunted down former friends. When the communists took over in 1948, those who had profited from the Revolution launched in May 1945 lost most of what they had gained.

The events of September 1938 and the occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia had made the Czechs more than bitter towards the German minority. The German-speaking area became part of the Reich, and the people Germans - this change of nationality was to prove fatal in 1945. The previously grieving regions were attributed to the nearest German land-mass: a Reichsgau Sudetenland encompassed the core towns of Troppau, Aussig, Eger and Reichenberg; the region around Hultschin was attached to Oppeln in Upper Silesia; northern Bohemia to Lower Bavaria; southern Bohemia to the new Austrian Reichsgau Upper Danube; southern Moravia to the newly forged Reichsgau Lower Danube; and Teschen to the recaptured Polish parts of Upper Silesia centred around Kattowitz.
⁶
In the remaining areas of the ‘Protectorate’ citizenship was awarded on racial grounds: ethnic Germans were attached to the Reich. For many German-speakers the change was tantamount to signing their death warrants.
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