Berlin at War (13 page)

more importantly, one of his workmates stated that he had seen him

jumping the perimeter fence of the railway and wandering off while

on duty. On 12 July 1941, Paul Ogorzow was arrested and formally

questioned again. Alibis were checked, forensic evidence gathered and

shoeprints compared. Six days later, after a lengthy interrogation, he

finally admitted to eight cases of murder, six cases of attempted murder

and a further thirty-one cases of sexual assault.

By way of a defence, Ogorzow attempted to chime with the Nazi

Zeitgeist
, claiming that his predatory and sexually aggressive behaviour

had been caused by an unconventional treatment for gonorrhoea

prescribed for him by a Jewish doctor. He might feasibly have had

some success with this anti-Semitic line of argument. After all, at least

one member of the Kripo investigating team – Georg Heuser – would

go on to forge a murderous career as commander of one of the

Einsatzgruppen
, the Nazi execution squads that slaughtered Jews en

masse across eastern Europe.46 However, the
Kriminalpolizei
gave

a deadly necessity

47

Ogorzow’s defence little credence, and cast him instead as a simple

sexual predator. In their final report, on 22 July 1941, they described

him as being ‘of a completely cold and calculating nature, without

any nerves or any inhibitions when it came to satisfying his sexual

urges’.

Barely two days later, at dawn on 25 July 1941, Paul Ogorzow was

executed by guillotine in Plötzensee prison. He expressed no regrets.47

The Kripo report concluded that he had ‘willingly and consciously

exploited the blackout’ in carrying out his crimes. The enforced dark-

ness of wartime Berlin, it said, ‘had given him greater opportunity

for his attacks . . . and had facilitated his escapes’.48 The blackout, it

seems, had been his ablest and most accommodating accomplice.

Of course, for the majority of Berliners the perils they faced during

the blackout were much more commonplace and mundane than those

represented by the ‘S-Bahn Murderer’. But, crucially, they were no less

deadly. Deaths attributed to the blackout continued to be shockingly

high for the first two years of the war: through 1940, for instance,

thirty Berliners died, on average, every month from blackout-related

accidents. One victim for every day of the year.49

Yet, curiously, those statistics drop off sharply during 1941. Though

accidental death rates remained fairly high – with average figures in

winter of around 100 per month – the numbers attributed to the

blackout dropped to only a handful. Either the figures were being

massaged, or the Berlin public had finally come to terms with life in

the darkness.

Throughout the war, the German authorities did not relax their guard

and continued to remind Berliners of the correct application of blackout

measures. Month after month, instructions, reminders and new regu-

lations poured forth, all of which were communicated to Berliners

through public information leaflets, articles in the press, or just the

bawled orders of the air raid wardens.

The supreme irony, however, was that, just as the blackout regu-

lations were being heightened, they were becoming irrelevant.

Technological advances, such as the development of radar, would

soon supersede the rationale given for the blackout in the first place,

and render all such efforts rather superfluous. Though radar had been

in development in Britain as well as Germany for many years, the

48

berlin at war

emergence of the British ‘H2S’ apparatus provided the significant

breakthrough. With this system – which became operational in 1943

– radar was able to reveal different types of terrain on the ground

and thereby provide a crude image of the land below the aircraft.

The images were far from perfect. The Chief of Bomber Command,

Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, for instance, learned early in 1943 that ‘there

was sometimes little or no relation between the real shape of a town

and the image of it that appeared in the H2S apparatus’.50 Some

quipped that the technology’s code name (the same as the formula

for hydrogen sulphide) was coined because ‘it stinks’. Nonetheless,

H2S picked up water very well, allowing the competent navigator to

find his targets by examining the rivers, coastlines and other patterns

appearing on the small five-inch screen before him.

This technology was to have important consequences for Berlin, a

city whose extensive network of rivers and lakes made it, potentially

at least, an easy target to identify. A chart produced in the summer

of 1943 showed some of the features that an RAF navigator might

expect to see; and – ominously for Berliners – it revealed a surprising

amount of detail. The city’s rivers and lakes were clearly visible: from

the Müggelsee to the east, with the River Spree snaking towards the

city centre, to the Havel River to the west, opening into a complex

of lakes – Wannsee, Havelsee and Tegelersee – before dis appearing to

the north-west. Though the city centre was largely an indeterminate

mass of white, some more defined built-up districts, such as Potsdam,

Spandau and the industrial area of Siemensstadt, could also be easily

made out. Most importantly of all, perhaps, the city’s numerous green

spaces and parks were also visible. Not only could the airport of

Tempelhof to the south-east be seen, but even the oblong of the

Tiergarten – in the very heart of the city – was clearly defined.51 Any

one of these locations could easily be used by an attacking bomb crew

for orientation, or as an aiming point.

H2S was not the radical breakthrough in radar technology that some

have suggested.52 It was certainly useful for crews attacking in darkness

or confronted by heavy cloud cover, as it meant that the
y
were no

longer entirely dependent on the normal, visual, points of reference.

But, though an improvement on traditional night-time navigation

methods, it was vastly inferior to visual aiming. It could not lead its

crews to a particular spot, or even to a particular suburb, but it could

a deadly necessity

49

help them to find a particular city – and even, once arrived, to adequately

navigate their way around it. And in this sense at least, H2S was of

profound importance. Though they couldn’t have known it, the people

of Berlin – dutifully carrying out their blackout measures, trying to

make their city invisible from the air – were wasting their time.

Despite this, the German authorities did not relax their vigilance.

In the summer of 1944, for instance, the body responsible for such

measures, the
Reichluftschutzbund
, or ‘Reich Air Defence Corps’, was

complaining to the German press that ‘in spite of its long existence,

the blackout was still not being carried out carefully enough’. ‘This

neglect’, it went on, ‘is primarily to be attributed to idleness, thought-

lessness, even irresponsibility.’53

Such reminders fell increasingly on deaf ears, however. Despite their

conscientious compliance with the blackout legislation in the early

phase of the war, some Berliners were clearly starting to ignore the

instructions. As the Wehrmacht’s ‘mood reports’ of the final months

of the war make clear, there were many complaints that the blackout

was being imperfectly applied. As one complainant recorded:

During an air raid on 2 January [1945], one could observe how a stream

of people emerged from the bunker in Fichtestrasse in Kreuzberg;

almost all of them with brightly lit torches. It was like a torch-lit parade.

Even when the flak started firing, it did not change. The police are not

bothered by it. The same scene could be observed that same night near

the bunker in Rosenthal.54

By that time – with Berlin exposed to night and day air raids, France

and Belgium liberated, and the Soviet army poised on the River Vistula

– Nazi Germany was standing on the very edge of the abyss. It seems

reasonable to conclude that the people of Berlin had other, more

pressing worries, than the filters on their pocket torches.

3

A Guarded Optimism

After the excitement and upheaval of those first days of the war, life

soon settled down for the majority of Berlin’s population and, once

again, assumed a veneer of normality, which the conflict – initially at

least – only rarely disturbed. Despite the profound shock that most

had experienced with the outbreak of hostilities, the differences that

they witnessed to their everyday lives were, in practical terms, really

rather subtle.

Indeed, for the opening phase of the war, it appears that a conscious

effort was made in Berlin to maintain some sense of normality, with

entertainment and sporting schedules enjoying more emphasis and

interest than in peacetime. ‘You can feel the effort here to make life

as normal as possible’, wrote William Shirer that October:

Berlin today has one of the heaviest sport programs of the year. The

races at Hoppegarten will attract a big crowd this afternoon. Besides

this the following events are scheduled in Berlin alone: one track-meet,

a bicycle race between Germany and Hungary, two hockey matches,

two rugby-football games, one wrestling match, one amateur boxing

show, one weight-lifting contest, two hundred handball games and one

hundred soccer matches.1

He was not mistaken. On the orders of the ‘Reich Sport Leader’, the

gloriously named Hans von Tschammer und Osten, sporting events

were, as far as possible, to remain unaffected by the war. An inter-

national rowing regatta scheduled to take place at Berlin-Grünau in

early October went ahead as planned. The high point of the racing

calendar – the Berlin Grand Prix – was held that autumn over 2,400

metres in the Hoppegarten, with a purse of 100,000 Reichsmarks.

a guarded optimism

51

Football, as one of the most important mass sports in the Third Reich,

was not slow to follow suit. Though the regional and national cham-

pionships were temporarily suspended with the outbreak of the war,

Berlin’s football clubs embarked on a cup competition of their own,

which – appropriately for the times – was named the Danzig Cup.

Aside from sport, there was a veritable plethora of other events to

distract Berliners. That autumn, the capital’s cinemas saw a number

of highlights, such as the courtroom drama
Sensationsprozess Casilla
,

starring Heinrich George, which was intended to mock the American

way of life. Most notable, perhaps, was a film about the life of the

biologist Robert Koch starring Emil Jannings in the title role. Jannings,

who was one of Nazi Germany’s foremost stars of the silver screen,

had starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel
, and had been

the very first recipient of an Oscar for Best Actor.

Elsewhere in the capital, there was much to entertain: from
Aida
,

La Traviata
and
Il Forza del Destino
in the city’s opera houses, to variety at the Winter Gardens, and a performance of the Goethe play
Götz

von Berlichingen
at the Schiller Theatre. It is little surprise, therefore, that Shirer concluded, ‘reading the sports pages and the theatre pages

of the morning papers today, you would hardly believe there was a

war on’.2

Shirer was right, but there were many other pages that would have

left the reader in little doubt that he was living in momentous times.

All newspapers had been subjected to additional editorial requirements

with the outbreak of war, which aimed at preventing their reports

from unwittingly giving any assistance to Germany’s enemies. In prac-

tice, these rules led to some subtle but nonetheless noticeable changes.

No longer, for instance, could newspapers feature a weather forecast,

for fear that such information might aid enemy air forces. Nor was it

permitted to publish anything that would reflect negatively on the

progress of the war or the state of morale on the home front. Those

readers who wanted something beyond the boasts and platitudes of

the Propaganda Ministry had to become expert in the art of reading

between the lines.

That first autumn and winter of the war were profoundly interesting

times. It had begun with the successful conquest of Poland, a deci-

sive victory that would have been unthinkable twenty years before.

52

berlin at war

There were other successes. Much was made in the German press

that winter, for instance, of the heroic return of Günther Prien, the

commander of
U-47
, which had sunk the British battleship
Royal Oak

at anchor in Scapa Flow in October. Prien became an instant celebrity

and was awarded the Knight’s Cross, the first sailor of the Kriegsmarine

to be so honoured. Yet, Germany had not had things all her own way.

For all the back-slapping that surrounded Prien, it was also known