Berlin at War (68 page)

being faced with the inevitable knot of civilians all trying to enter at

the same time, often driven to a frenzy by the wailing sirens. Ursula

von Kardorff recalled trying to get into the zoo bunker in 1944: ‘It

was eerie’, she wrote, ‘a mass of people all running in the dark, with

the flak already firing, all making for the entrances, which are much

too narrow. Torches are lit and then the shout goes up of “Lights

Out!” Then the people push and shove and squeeze themselves in,

and one wonders how it all seems to sort itself out.’57 French labourer

Marcel Elola was more damning. Witnessing the crush to get into the

bunker on Landsberger Platz in the spring of 1944, he recalled:

When the sirens go off, a huge stream of people head in the direction

of the entrance. It is terrible to watch, as the women and children are

shoved and even trampled by men, who are just as afraid as they are.

The air raid wardens are just not in a position to establish any authority:

those in charge are either children or old men. There is not the slightest

discipline.58

It could be more than just a nuisance. On New Year’s Day 1944,

twenty-one Berliners were trampled to death when the queue for a

public shelter was panicked into a stampede by a nearby raid.59 At Neu

Kölln, in the summer of 1944, meanwhile, a large number of civilians

were caught trying to enter a converted subway station. As the flak

was already firing and the sirens wailing, there was considerable urgency,

but for whatever reason those at the entrance to the shelter became

stuck. It took soldiers ten minutes to clear the bottleneck, but by that

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time ten civilians had already been killed, asphyxiated in the crush or

trampled underfoot.60

Inside the cellars and bunkers it was often little easier. The claus-

trophobic atmosphere was oppressive, the lack of privacy rankled, and

there was the all-pervading stench of sweat, urine and halitosis – the

inevitable consequence of cramming a large cross-section of humanity

into a small space for any length of time. People tended to deal with

the stress in their own way. Some babbled and talked incessantly, others

prayed or fussed over their children. The majority were left alone with

their thoughts. Ursula von Kardorff recorded the complexity of

emotions that raced through her mind during a raid in the spring

of 1944:

Now and then the light goes out. I wonder if that’s a bomb landing

close by? Next to me there is a small child, quite calm. He has no idea.

Will we suffocate here? Or be slowly roasted like in the bunkers in

Hamburg? An unpleasant thought. I wonder if I have a guardian angel?

. . . I wonder if my house is still standing. And, if it is, ‘they’ will

certainly be back tomorrow anyway.61

For many Berliners fear was the defining emotion of the period.

One did not simply ‘get used to it’; rather, as many eyewitnesses

suggest, it grew with each raid, layered with the gruesome experi-

ences of loved ones or friends, the visions of destroyed buildings, and

the memory of lines of corpses laid out for identification. Josepha

von Koskull recalled the many horror stories that did the rounds,

‘about being buried alive, about charred bodies that were shrunk to

the size of small children, and that could be buried in a margarine

tub. Often it was said that the impact of a heavy air mine . . . would

burst one’s lungs bringing death.’62 Panic attacks were not uncommon.

One diarist described a woman having a ‘screaming fit’ as she was

being escorted up into one of the Berlin flak towers: ‘She thought she

would die there, “I have a husband and son at the front”, she screeched.

“I am not going up there”. Finally, she was removed . . . I thought, if

panic breaks out in here, God help us.’63

Even for those who managed to keep their fears in check, the experi -

ence was profoundly unpleasant. The same endless sitting in rather

uncomfortable surroundings, with a small case at one’s feet containing

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329

valuable documents and other necessities; the same staring at the bare

walls, listening to the murmured prayers and sobs of those whom fate

– and the RAF – had thrown together.

By far the worst part, however, was the sheer cacophony of a raid:

the distant, menacing thud of falling bombs, growing louder and more

threatening as the bombers approached. Though many reassured them-

selves with the mantra that ‘if you can hear the bomb then it won’t

hit you’, the noise was profoundly disconcerting:

After the first impact, the light in the bunker went out. A burning candle

was placed on the stairwell of each floor. Around us, whilst the bombs

fell and death and destruction raged, there was breathless quiet.

Somewhere a rumble started; a terrible rolling of thunder that comes

nearer; the bunker rocks, but holds, and the rumble fades away. Then

another one starts with terrible blasts, again it seems to roll towards us,

comes close, and then crashes away into the distance. For a long time

after the last explosion is heard, there is absolute silence in the bunker,

amongst young and old. Then the realisation dawns, that it’s over.64

For some, however, that terrifying crescendo of explosions did not

dissipate, or rumble off into the distance. Near the end of a raid, Ruth

Andreas-Friedrich and her partner were contemplating returning

upstairs to their apartment, when a ‘thundering hell’ broke loose

around them:

we fall to our knees, slide along the floor like repentant sinners towards

the pillar that is the single support of the house walls . . . Broken glass

scatters around us. Masses of dark-gray dust whirl through the air.

Smoke, flames, sulphur-coloured fog . . . We choke and cough. Fire to

the right. Fire to the left. A deluge of flames from all sides. . . . Time

stands still; eternity has begun . . . Stones topple; a storm thrusts a

whirlpool of sparks through the shattered windows.65

Leopold Deutsch described another direct hit, on his home in

Kreuzberg in the spring of 1944:

With our backs to the wall, we heard the first detonations as they came

closer and closer. The emergency light was switched on. Suddenly, there

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was a particularly loud crash and the light went out, so the Hindenburg

lights were lit on the table. . . . Shortly afterwards, there was another

detonation. I watched as – almost in slow motion – the ceiling fell inwards

like a trapdoor close to the entrance. The Hindenburg lights went out,

and I could hear only the din of falling masonry and debris. The rubble

rose like the tide, until I passed out.66

Only a child at the time, Leopold was one of the few to be brought

alive out of the ruins of the shelter.

Renate Knispel recalled being rescued from what was left of her

cellar in January 1944. She and her family had only just reached the

shelter, when the building received a direct hit:

One had the feeling that one’s head would be ripped off. We were

buried up to our waists. Beneath the rubble I squeezed my mother’s

hand. She squeezed back, so I knew she was alive. We waited to be

rescued. Finally, there was a knocking on the wall from the people next

door, and one of us knocked back. Then they knocked a hole in the

wall and pulled us out one by one. We were taken through their cellar,

in which we were astonished to see that the light still worked. When

the neighbours saw us they started laughing. We did not understand

until someone handed us a mirror. We were completely covered with

a thick layer of grey dust.67

It is not surprising that the air raids provoked a fatalistic – even

apathetic – attitude among Berliners. Ursula von Kardorff reckoned

that such attitudes had become the norm: ‘if it comes, it comes’, one

acquaintance of hers averred, ‘you cannot escape your fate’.68 One girl

remembered her mother telling her in 1943 that the family would from

then on sleep together, with their heads all in the same direction. If

a bomb hit them, she reasoned, they would at least all die together.69

Those killed would be pulled from the ruins by their former neigh-

bours, or by teams of soldiers or forced labourers thrown together

for the purpose. Marcel Elola recalled the grisly task of recovering the

bodies of a family from a collapsed house:

With the others, we pulled out the three adults, or rather what remained

of them. They were torn to pieces and their remains could be removed

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331

in a washbowl. Then we pulled the little girl out of the rubble. Her

body was in one piece, her eyes protruding. We laid her in the yard

on a pile of stones. Her dress was hardly torn. She had often come to

the factory and we had given her chocolate. Another image that I will

not forget: this child, lying there on her back, arms crossed, as though

she had just fallen asleep on the piles of rubble and ash; all that remained

of her family.70

Initially, any unidentified corpses would be laid out in the street so

that a name might be provided by neighbours and passers-by. After the

larger raids, however, the potential shock caused by leaving large

numbers of corpses on public display was such that the dead were laid

out, incongruously, in school halls and gymnasiums. In many cases,

the severity of the injuries meant that identification was almost impos-

sible. When a girls’ school on the Neuenburgerstrasse was hit early in

1945, the hundred or so corpses of the young victims were laid out in

nearby buildings to be identified by their distraught parents, but their

injuries were such that only a few of them could be named.71 In due

course, those few were handed over to their next of kin for burial. The

remainder were interred in a dedicated section of a local cemetery.

For those fortunate enough to survive a raid, the first task was to

check if their homes were still intact. Ursula von Kardorff was among

those bombed out in the raid of 1 February 1944. While the attack

was still raging, she had left the cellar and climbed the stairs, only to

find her apartment burning fiercely and realise that there was little

left to rescue. ‘We dragged what we could find down the stairs’, she

wrote in her diary the next day, ‘and simply threw beds, books, and

cushions out of the window.’ ‘Somehow’, she concluded, ‘I always

knew that it would come to this.’72 Others were unable to salvage even

the essentials. Erich Neumann could save only the family dog and a

case of beer, when his mother’s bar was bombed in 1944.73

In many cases, the bombed-out had nowhere to go. Official instruc-

tions held that they were to seek shelter initially with friends or family,

but failing that they would be rehoused by the authorities. In the short

term, the Nazi welfare organisation, the NSV, took care of refugees,

setting up tents in the city’s parks, while field kitchens – wheeled stoves

with tall chimneys, known affectionately as
Gulasch-Kanonen
– dished

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berlin at war

up hot food and soup. Thus fortified, the bombed-out would begin an

interminable round of office visits and form-filling, in search of new

accommodation, replacement furniture and clothing, much of which

came from ‘evacuated’ Jews.

Many, however, were reluctant to leave what remained of their

former homes and preferred to camp out among their few rescued

possessions. For some, it seems the act of repairing and making good

represented a form of continuity, even of sanity. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich

recognised this point. ‘Why make repairs?’ she questioned:

Why do millions of people keep starting all over to build up what may

be in fragments again within the next hour? . . .

I think I know the answer. We make repairs because we have to,

because we couldn’t live another day if we weren’t allowed to make

repairs.

If our living room goes, we move into the kitchen. If the kitchen

is smashed, we transfer to the hall. If the hall is in ruins, we set up in

the cellar. Anything so long as we can stay at home. The most dismal

scrap of home is better than any palace somewhere else. That’s why

they all come back someday – the people whom the bombs have driven

out of the city. They root among the stone fragments of their ruined

houses; they go to work with shovel and broom, hammer, tongs and

pickaxe, until one day a new home rises out of the charred foundation

– a Robinson Crusoe stockade, perhaps, but a home nonetheless. You

can’t live if you don’t belong anywhere.74

Thus many Berliners ended up living beneath canvas in a ruined

shell of their home, without heating and lacking even the most basic

creature comforts. As Ursula von Kardorff explained, that existence

could be sorely trying:

Our flat: without a door, windows, heating, light, water, telephone and

gas, is worse than a wooden hut in the wilderness. A civilisation destroyed

makes one feel completely helpless. Come the evening, when the dusk