Berlin at War (17 page)

border of the Reich, by obliquely suggesting that an airborne inva-

sion of Britain would be the next operation.50 Whether the public

believed the ruse or not, it did little to raise the mood as it indicated

that the ‘lull’ of 1940–41 was merely the pause between two battles,

rather than the end of the war.

The result was a combination of confusion and suspicion in which

rumour and hearsay flourished. As the
New York Times
noted on 20

June, a Nazi spokesman complained in a press conference of the

‘tremendous flood of rumours’51 that had erupted surrounding

German–Russian relations. Though he took pains to deny them, he

offered little else by way of confirmation or contradiction. Nazi mood

reports, meanwhile, relayed more of their substance. Across the Reich,

it was noted, ‘the Russian question is being discussed incessantly’. In

general, the opinions expressed were optimistic: Stalin would travel

to Berlin, some suggested, to negotiate with Hitler face to face; others

believed that Ukraine would be granted to Germany on a ninety-nine-

year lease. ‘Only a minority’, the report concluded, suspected the

scenario that would soon transpire to be the truth; ‘that German–

Russian negotiations had come to nought and that an invasion of

Russia would begin around the end of the month.’52

* * *

a guarded optimism

69

The 22nd of June 1941 fell on a Sunday. Coming at the end of a period

of fine, dry weather, many Berliners found the day a good excuse for

packing a picnic and heading for the parks and lakes of Berlin. There

they could try to forget about rationing and escape the war that had

seemed, of late, to have reached stalemate.

As the sun came up that morning, a few early risers were already

preparing rolls, sandwiches or flasks of ersatz coffee to take with them

for their excursion. They would head out of the city in their droves,

perhaps to go boating on the Havelsee, or stroll around the shores of

the Müggelsee, where children would happily splash in the water.

Some would head further afield, perhaps to Potsdam, where they

would visit Frederick the Great’s palace of Sans Souci to walk in the

gardens or view the royal art collections. Others would simply take a

tram to the Tiergarten in the heart of the city, where it was still quite

possible, both literally and metaphorically, to lose oneself.

For some, that Sunday morning offered a chance to sleep off the

exertions of the night before. Though in the middle of a war, the

German capital had few restrictions on entertainment, especially after

the ban on public dancing, which had been imposed with the outbreak

of war, had been lifted a couple of weeks earlier. Consequently, there

would have been much to entertain night owls. Some might have taken

in a Richard Strauss opera – such as
Wiener Blut
, playing at the theatre

on Nollendorfplatz, or
Ariadne auf Naxos
, which was running at the

Staatsoper across town on Unter den Linden. Others might have visited

one of the city’s many cabaret shows, such as the famous
Kabarett der

Komiker,
or ‘KadeKo’, on Kurfürstendamm, hosted that summer by the

renowned cabaret star Willi Schaeffers. In addition, the UFA cinemas

across the capital offered a host of other attractions that weekend, from

Der Weg ins Freie
, starring Zarah Leander, to the drama
Carl Peters
, a swipe at British imperialism set in late nineteenth-century East Africa.

Early that Sunday, however, all Berliners would have become dimly

aware that something was afoot. They might have listened to the radio,

or heard snatches of conversations from the street or the stairwell.

Had they done so, they would have learned that Hitler had finally

turned on his erstwhile ally: Operation Barbarossa – the German inva-

sion of the Soviet Union – was under way.

At 5.30 that morning, Goebbels read the Führer’s proclamation

across all radio stations from his office in the Reich Ministry for

70

berlin at war

Propaganda. It was a strange document. ‘German People! National

Socialists!’ it began: ‘Weighted down with heavy cares, condemned to

months-long silence, the hour has come when at last I can speak

frankly.’ The average Berliner up with the lark would have been

confused as to what precisely he was listening to. And that confusion

was unlikely to have been dispelled by what followed, as the first half

of the proclamation was aimed, almost exclusively, at the British,

whose perfidious methods of waging war by proxy and seeking to

decimate the German population, Hitler claimed, had forced Germany

into this ‘act of self-protection’.

When the proclamation finally switched to the Soviets, Hitler

claimed to harbour ‘no hostile feeling against the peoples of Russia’,

but was unswerving in his condemnation of their ‘Jewish Bolshevist

rulers’. There then followed an exhaustive, point-by-point refuta-

tion of Soviet claims and demands, the intricacies of which would

doubtless have been lost on the majority of his audience. However,

Hitler’s proclamation ended with words that few would have failed

to understand:

German people! At this moment a march is taking place that, as

regards extent, compares with the greatest the world hitherto has

seen . . . The German Eastern Front extends from East Prussia . . . to

the shores of the Black Sea. The task of this front, therefore, no

longer is the protection of single countries, but the safeguarding of

Europe and thereby the salvation of us all . . . May God help us in

this fight!53

This proclamation, read and broadcast live on all German radio

channels, would be repeated throughout the day. Half an hour later,

at 6.00 a.m., Foreign Minister Ribbentrop gave a similar address to

domestic and foreign journalists in a press conference at the Foreign

Office. Later in the day, Hitler promulgated another declaration, this

time to the soldiers of the new Eastern Front. ‘German soldiers!’, he

proclaimed, ‘You enter a fight that will be both hard and laden with

responsibility because the fate of Europe, the future of the German

Reich, and the existence of our people rests solely in your hands.’54

Once again, uncharacteristically, he invoked God’s help in the struggle

to come. This proclamation, too, would be broadcast relentlessly

a guarded optimism

71

through the day – both on radio and via loudspeakers in the streets

– and would be published verbatim in the newspapers.

While the politicians pontificated, 700 kilometres to the east

soldiers of Hitler’s Wehrmacht were embarking on the largest mili-

tary operation in European history: 3.5 million men, supported by

nearly 4,000 tanks and over 2,500 aircraft, were advancing along a

2,000-kilometre front, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

They were opening the most decisive theatre of the war in Europe,

the theatre in which the lion’s share of Germany’s five million mili-

tary deaths would occur.

The public reaction to the commencement of Operation Barbarossa

was mixed. Officially, the Berlin public was stoical, demonstrating

‘complete trust in our Wehrmacht’ and ‘facing the coming events with

calmness and martial determination’.55 The reality was slightly different,

however. There was a profound sense of shock, not least among those

who had not seen it coming. Lutz Ritter recalled that his father had

organised a sailing trip with friends on the Müggelsee that morning.

As the would-be sailors were gathered on the landing stage waiting

to board, the announcement came through on the radio. ‘It was as

though they had been struck by lightning’, Ritter reported, ‘nobody

spoke.’56

There was also a sense of liberation. Goebbels, for one, described

feeling ‘totally free’ with the invasion, as ‘the burden of many weeks

and months’57 was finally lifted. Ordinary Berliners would have felt a

similar sense of relief, not only because they could now move on from

the rumour and hearsay of recent weeks and face the new challenges,

but also because Germany could at last engage with what many of

them regarded as their country’s most dangerous opponent. Even the

less ideologically committed would have absorbed the vehement anti-

Soviet rhetoric of the early 1930s and adjusted only with difficulty to

the tactical alliance with Moscow which had opened the war. The

American Henry Flannery noted:

The war against Russia was the first popular campaign that had been

launched. None of the Germans had been able to understand why a

treaty should have been made with the Soviets, after they had been the

main object of denunciation since 1933. Now they had a sense of relief,

a feeling of final understanding. I listened to their conversations around

72

berlin at war

the news-stands and on the subways. I talked with a number of them.

For the first time, they were excited about the war.

‘Now,’ they said, ‘we are fighting our real enemy.’58

Tellingly perhaps, the extra editions of the newspapers were purchased

with particular alacrity that morning59 – in sharp contrast to earlier

points during the war.

Berlin’s communists undoubtedly felt the same sense of relief, albeit

for a very different reason. With the Nazi attack on the ‘bastion of

world revolution’, they were finally free from the ideological gymnas-

tics that they had been obliged to perform for the past two years. No

longer did they have to bite their tongues when they read about the

‘eternal friendship’ between Nazi Germany and the USSR. With Hitler’s

attack on Stalin, they now knew on which side they stood: the Soviet

Union, the ‘home of the proletarian revolution’, had to be defended.

To this end, numerous underground groupings in the capital – among

them those run by ‘Beppo’ Römer and Robert Uhrig – began to plan

their part in the struggle to come.60

Many Berliners were simply stunned. The most perspicacious among

them foresaw that the campaign against the Soviet Union would bring

with it new hardships, new privations. Helmut James von Moltke was

excited about the invasion – of which he had received advance word

through his military contacts – but was nonetheless filled with fore-

boding. He wrote to his wife the day before the invasion was launched,

to warn her that ‘tomorrow everything will look different, and many

things will assail us which we must arm ourselves against’.61 Others

warned that a swift victory of the kind that had been achieved up to

that point was unlikely. As one of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s friends

noted grimly that day: ‘Don’t be deceived gentlemen . . . Russia has

never been suited to lightning wars. What’s the good of our being in

the Urals? They’ll just go on fighting beyond the Urals. No, that

mouthful is one we can’t chew.’62

For this reason, perhaps, those who ventured out of town for a walk

in the park or a visit to Potsdam that Sunday were a little preoccupied.

Yet, with the sun shining and nature in the full flush of summer, their

mood would probably have lightened somewhat. As Berliners had

learned by now, in wartime one had to take one’s pleasures where and

when one could and learn to block out the wider picture. This was

a guarded optimism

73

certainly the mood that a Swiss journalist detected in Berlin that

weekend, writing: ‘Out there [in the parks and lakes], nothing reminds

one of the war, as it is an unwritten rule that such free time out in the

countryside should not be diminished by thoughts of war.’ He continued

that ‘the fateful invasion of Russia has not prevented Berliners from

enjoying the beautiful summer weather with gay abandon . . . [and]

many thousands were out in the woods and on the lakes around Berlin.’63

With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to see the invasion of

the Soviet Union as the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. But

from the perspective of Berlin in the summer of 1941, the new theatre

of the war was just that: another theatre, another act in the ongoing

drama, another list of unpronounceable locations on a map, another

excuse for hyperbole from the Nazi regime’s propagandists.

To most Berliners, Operation Barbarossa would not have been

considered in strategic or political terms, but on a much more human

level; in terms of the sons, brothers, fathers and friends who were

now fighting for Hitler, for Germany and for their lives. The first of

more than three million men crossed the Soviet border that morning.

Every household and every family in Berlin would have known some-

body who was there.

4

Marching on their Stomachs

Enjoying the snow on New Year’s morning 1940, few Berliners would

have suspected that they were witnessing the first flurries of one of

the worst winters in European history. As the snow fell that January,

temperatures dropped also, reaching levels not experienced in living