Berlin at War (46 page)

name suggests, it played requests from soldiers at the front, and from

their families back home, thereby providing a vital channel for messages

between the two. Each programme opened with:
Liebe Soldaten, Liebe

Hörer in der Heimat, Liebe Freunde jenseits der Grenze
(‘Dear soldiers, dear listeners at home, dear friends beyond the frontier’), and then gave a

list of those units and individuals who had requested a particular tune.

The tone of the programme was upbeat, offering the home front a

dose of escapism, and giving soldiers an uplifting vision of ‘normality’

back home.41

The music itself tended to be popular German fare, rather than clas-

sical. To this end, so-called
Volksmusik
, or ‘people’s music’ – schmaltzy patriotic tunes, such as ‘
Glocken der Heimat
’ (‘Bells of the Homeland’)

– tended to predominate. Military themes were also ever-present,

including the rousing
Panzerlied
, and the song of the Afrika Korps,

‘
Panzer rollen in Afrika vor
’ (‘Panzers roll in Africa’).

The favourites of German stage and screen also received regular airings,

such as Zarah Leander and Marika Rökk. Indeed, one of the most famous

songs of the war, after ‘
Lili Marleen
’, was Leander’s saccharine ‘
Ich weiss
,
es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’
(‘I know a miracle will happen’),

which was taken from the hit film
Die Grosse Liebe
(‘The Great Love’).

Sung in Leander’s trademark deep contralto voice, with its extravagantly

rolled ‘r’s, it would become one of the theme tunes of the German

home front.

Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n

und dann werden tausend Märchen wahr.

Ich weiss, so schnell kann keine Liebe vergehn,

die so gross ist und so wunderbar.

I know, one day a miracle will happen

And then a thousand fairy tales will come true

I know that a love cannot die so quickly

That is so great and so wonderful.

Naturally perhaps for a programme that borrowed so much from

218

berlin at war

the silver screen, the
Wunschkonzert
quickly spawned a cinema

spin-off of its own. The film
Wunschkonzert
– with Ilse Werner and

Carl Raddatz in the leads – told the story of two lovers, separated

by the war, who are reunited by the radio request show. After its

premiere in Berlin in December 1940, Goebbels noted its ‘magnifi-

cent reception’42 and congratu lated himself – he had, after all, come

up with the idea.
Wunschkonzert
would go on to be one of the most

commercially successful films of the Third Reich.

Radio did not only serve as a source of light entertainment and distrac-

tion. It could also be a life-saver.
Drahtfunk
, or ‘wire radio’, had been tested in the 1930s and was later introduced in Berlin and a few other

parts of the Reich. It was essentially a forerunner of modern broad-

band, offering radio signals via the telephone cables, with the advan-

tage that such signals could not be jammed or disrupted and suffered

only limited interference.

Drahtfunk
could therefore be used as an emergency radio network.

From 1943, when the Allied bombing campaign against Germany was

reaching a new intensity, conventional
Reichssender
radio was switched

off when enemy aircraft were approaching, for fear that their navigators

might be able to home in on radio transmissions. On signing off, the

Reichssender
would advise its listeners to switch over to
Drahtfunk
. This was achieved by plugging the radio set into a splitter box on the telephone cable, and tuning to the appropriate frequency.

Drahtfunk
did not broadcast programmes or music; rather, it advised

solely on the progress of enemy air attacks. As Berliner Gisela Richter

remembered: ‘The reports went something like this: “Enemy bomber

squadrons approaching the territory of the Reich!” After a while:

“Enemy bomber squadrons in the grid square Gustav/Heinrich (G/H)

flying in the direction of Emil/Nordpol (E/N) and so on.” G/H was

always dangerous for Berlin. When those letters were given, we knew

it was our turn.’43

In time, the system would become more sophisticated. When Allied

bombers reached the area of Hanover and Braunschweig, the warning

siren would be sounded in the capital; and when Stendal and Rathenau

– fifty miles to the west of Berlin – were overflown, the air raid siren

would wail into life. The longer the war progressed, however, the more

unreliable the siren became, sometimes only being sounded when

the people’s friend

219

enemy aircraft were already in the skies above the capital. The early

warning provided by
Drahtfunk
, therefore, allowed Berliners to get down

to their shelters in good time. Ernst Schmidt remembered his father

listening in to the ‘wire radio’ and then ordering the family to leave

their home. ‘We joined a tide of people flowing down to the shelter’,

he recalled, ‘and father told us that the alarm would not be sounded

for another ten minutes.’44

Others tuned in to the broadcasts of the local air defence network,

the so-called
Flaksender
or
Myosender
, where more thoroughgoing reports of enemy air movements were given. Peter Jung’s father was

a regular listener:

My father had got hold of maps, not intended for the public, which

showed Germany divided into grid-squares, each one labelled with a

letter of the alphabet. Every evening, around six or seven o’clock, the

game began anew: the map would be spread out on the table and the

radio would be tuned to the frequency of the Berlin control room to

hear if enemy planes had entered the Reich’s airspace. If the control

room was already transmitting, then one heard . . . announcements in

the form of grid references with additional geographical locations. . . .

In order to follow the individual bomber squadrons, my father gave me

the various counters from our game of Ludo, while the direction of

flight was marked with matches. . . . When a squadron reached the area

of Brandenburg an der Havel, it was clear that Berlin was the target.

Then it was time to turn off the radio and go down into the cellar.45

Radio enjoyed a chequered career in Hitler’s Germany. That which

had begun as a propaganda tool of the first order had changed into

a source of information and entertainment for the public, before

morphing again into a valuable survival tool during the air war. The

number of civilian lives saved by this simple technology is unknown,

but it must be considered to be substantial. One might conclude that,

in this aspect alone, radio truly proved its status as ‘the eighth Great

Power’.

11

The Watchers and the Watched

In the early hours of 13 June 1942, residents in Kleine Markusstrasse in

Friedrichshain were woken by a disturbance on the street outside. It

would not have been an unusual occurrence. Friedrichshain was one

of the traditional working-class districts of the capital and so would

have been alive with all the noise and commotion of urban life. In

the 1930s, as one of the hotbeds of ‘red Berlin’, the district had seen

numerous running street battles between communists and ‘brown-

shirts’. It had even been christened ‘Horst-Wessel-Stadt’ by the Nazis,

after their most famous martyr, who was murdered there in 1930.1

On that warm June night, the brawling in the street was evidently

serious or loud enough for one resident to call the police. When they

arrived, order was quickly restored and the miscreants were bundled

into a police van. Most of them would duly face a charge of affray,

or disorderly conduct, and be fined by a judge before being released.

But for one of them, the consequences would be much more serious.

One of those arrested that night was Bruno Wattermann, a Romany.

A slightly gaunt man, in his mid-twenties, with a fashionable pencil

moustache, Wattermann had been born in Stettin on the Baltic coast

and had spent much of his early life on the road, living in a traditional

caravan. As a young man, he had then settled in Berlin, where he

scraped a living as an occasional horse dealer.

He had been in trouble with the authorities before. In 1938, he had

been arrested under the catch-all of ‘anti-social behaviour’, as he was of

no fixed address, and was sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald,

where he had remained for fourteen months. However, as his Gestapo

file ominously concluded, this punishment appears to have made ‘little

impression’ on him.2

Under interrogation, following the brawl in Friedrichshain, Wattermann

the watchers and the watched

221

told his story. After his release from Buchenwald, he had returned to

Berlin and attempted to ‘go straight’, finding work at a Blaupunkt factory

in nearby Kreuzberg. But he had found himself unable to keep to the

routine of everyday life and soon was regularly absenting himself from

work, claiming illness. After being fired, he found another position at a

factory in Neukölln, but the old habits recurred and he was finally hauled

before a local court and fined 40 Reichsmarks for his persistent absen-

teeism. During the year before his arrest, it transpired, Wattermann had

been absent from work for twenty weeks.3

Aside from his apparent inability to hold down a job, Wattermann

also suffered because of his racial background. Nazi Germany viewed

the 30,000 or so Sinti and Roma within the German population much

as they viewed the Jews – as alien bloodstock that ought to be removed.

Thus, most of the racial laws that were applied to German Jews also

applied to German gypsies – they were forbidden to intermarry or even

have sexual relations with Germans, and were liable to special taxes.

Moreover, they could face sterilisation or arbitrary imprisonment.4

So the odds were stacked against Bruno Wattermann receiving a

fair hearing from the Berlin Gestapo. To make matters worse,

Wattermann had been drunk at the time of his arrest, and his inter-

rogators quickly suspected that he was dabbling in the black market,

selling textiles and even diamonds. Ordinarily, this combination of

minor infractions and unconfirmed suspicions might have sufficed for

a suspect to be fined or released with a warning. In Wattermann’s

case however, the conclusion of the Gestapo was stark and un -

equi vocal. Not only was he a ‘gypsy’, the report stated, he also

‘belonged to those asocial elements which refuse to pursue regular

work and persistently seek to lead a carefree life at the expense of the

German people’. Many warnings and punishments, it said, had been

without effect, and Wattermann had demonstrated that ‘he absolutely

will not improve himself’ and had proved a ‘serious disturbance’ to

the public. The report concluded that it was unacceptable for him

to remain ‘at liberty’.5

Later that summer, two months after his arrest – and without trial

– Wattermann was designated an ‘asocial’ and was sent for indefinite

detention with hard labour to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen

near Berlin.6

* * *

222

berlin at war

The Gestapo, or
Geheime Staatspolizei
– Secret State Police – stood at the very heart of the Nazi regime. Synonymous – along with the SS – with

the Nazi ‘terror’, its origins were rather more mundane. It had been

established in 1933, emerging out of the old Prussian political police, and

had subsequently taken its place among the constellation of acronyms

that populated the German police network. Along with the criminal

police,
Kriminalpolizei
(or Kripo), which investigated serious criminal cases, the Gestapo fell under the umbrella of the security police, the

Sicherheitspolizei
(or Sipo). Regular, everyday policing, meanwhile, was

handled by the so-called order police, the
Ordnungspolizei
(or Orpo). By

1939, all of these organisations, which operated nationwide, were sub -

ordinated to the Reich Main Security Office, the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt

(or RSHA), and ultimately, Heinrich Himmler’s SS.

But the Gestapo was not just another police unit. Its primary role was

to act as a political police force – to investigate and combat all activities

that were deemed dangerous or inimical to the Nazi state. It did not,

however, practise the same randomised persecution and killing that had

been witnessed in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Gestapo ‘terror’ was not

random. It did not kill by quota, or terrorise its would-be victims by its

own unpredictability or caprice. It was very targeted, seeking to weed

out political criminals and focus very specifically on those whom the

regime decreed to be ‘undesirable’. A glance at its internal structure