Berlin at War (69 page)

falls and the witching hour begins, it is dreadful: the banging of the

window frames, the damp and the cold, and to cap it all, the melancholic

darkness. I can’t stand even an hour of it. It’s just beyond my endurance.75

reaping the whirlwind

333

Another priority was to look for loved ones who were missing. That

search could be made easier by the practice of pinning paper notes

to the door frames or scrawling chalk inscriptions on the blackened

walls of burnt-out buildings, detailing the fate and the whereabouts

of those who had lived there: ‘All safe and well from this cellar’, they

might read, or, ‘Dear Gretchen. Where are you? Your Hans’, or the

more poignant ‘We are alive. Luzie’. One eyewitness recalled arriving

at his shattered home on Innsbrucker Platz to find a note in his

mother’s handwriting, stating that the family was alive and was living

in Zehlendorf.76 Missie Vassiltchikov also wrote a chalk message on

the wall when she was bombed out, ostensibly for the ‘various beaux’

whom she hoped would still be calling for her: ‘Missie and Loremarie

are well, staying in Potsdam with B.’77 In time, as people returned and

read the messages, replies would be scribbled below.

Other inscriptions were soon to be seen among the ruins. The

slogan
Unsere Mauern können brechen, unsere Herzen nicht
– ‘Our walls

might break, but not our hearts’ – was commonly daubed on the

capital’s bomb sites, or printed on official posters or banners that were

displayed in the rubble. Ursula von Kardorff was not impressed.

‘Complete nonsense’, she wrote in her diary, ‘the sort of thing that

only makes an impression on a blockhead.’78 Others developed slogans

of their own. One favourite quip of the later years of the war was to

wryly repeat Hitler’s election slogan from 1933: ‘Give me four years,

and you will not recognise Germany.’

Despite the large scale of death, destruction and suffering, civilian

morale in the German capital did not collapse, as ‘Bomber’ Harris had

anticipated. Berlin was subjected to one of the most concentrated bombing

campaigns of the war, attracting the largest tonnage of Allied bombs –

over 67,000 tonnes – of any German city.79 Yet there was no civilian unrest

and the Nazi regime did not crumble. There are a number of reasons

for this. For one thing, Berlin simply did not ‘burn’ as readily as the RAF

had hoped; its wide boulevards and stone-built avenues did not lend them-

selves to the ignition of the firestorms that had wrought such catastrophic

damage to the old medieval cities of Hamburg and Cologne. For another,

the death toll in the German capital was relatively low, amounting to

around 50,000 casualties from air attack for the entire war.80 In compar-

ison, the wartime civilian death toll in London amounted to around

30,000, from the dropping of around 20,000 tonnes of bombs.81

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berlin at war

One should not imagine, however, that the RAF’s efforts had no

effect on morale in the German capital. There was certainly an accel-

erating dilution of the faith that many Berliners – and indeed

Germans as a whole – had in the Nazis. The regime had earned the

loyalty of the German people primarily through their restoration

both of the economy at home and of German ‘honour’ on the inter-

national stage and, to some degree, the outbreak of war in 1939

could be construed as an extension of these principles. But from 1943

– with the defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk, the collapse of Italy and

the advent of large-scale aerial bombing – it would have been clear

to many that the tide was turning.82

However, a number of factors effectively combined to prevent any

open expression of dissent. Firstly, the Nazis were expert at manipu-

lating public opinion through the use of propaganda, and this skill

was honed still further in the latter stages of the war. Also, the vast

majority of Berliners knew very well what fate awaited those who

openly criticised the regime, or even began to conspire against it.

There was a more ‘positive’ factor at play. The Nazi state delivered

on its promises. Not only did it undertake a massive programme of

bunker building for its civilian population – which far outstripped the

paltry assistance on offer to Londoners during the Blitz – it also had

extensive welfare networks and compensation schemes to help those

who were bombed out. At a time when the civilian population was

most reliant on the regime, the regime delivered.

Moreover, in place of that shrinking political loyalty, other loyalties

emerged. The first of these was a default ‘My country – right or wrong’

form of patriotism that would celebrate German successes – even though

it might be sceptical of the Nazi regime itself. This attitude was born

not only of the common peril that Berliners faced, but also of the loyalty

to the large numbers of young men from Berlin – sons, brothers and

fathers – who were fighting in Germany’s name at the time. As the

British had discovered for themselves earlier in the war, when the

Luftwaffe was pounding London and other cities, the most likely result

of an air offensive is a strengthening, not a weakening, of domestic

morale.83

Beyond that default patriotism, a network of self-help communities

emerged based on the solidarity of an extended family, a particular

street or even a single building. As one Berliner recalled of an air raid

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335

in 1943: ‘We clung to each other. It did not matter whose hand we held

or whom we embraced. In that moment the walls fell that divided

Communist from Nazi, Mutti from fingernail-painted Frau Fuchs, the

drunk from his sober neighbour and children from adults.’84 In many

cases, it would be these groups and these allegiances that would help

to sustain Berliners through the brutal terminal phase of the Third

Reich.

16

To Unreason and Beyond

The 18th of February 1943 was a beautiful early spring day. The clear

blue sky over the capital would have lifted the public mood and encour-

aged Berliners to shed their hats, coats and scarves, constant acces-

sories for the previous few months. Though spring itself was still a

good few weeks off, the unusual warmth of the sun that day meant

that Berliners could allow themselves to believe that another hard

winter of war was behind them.

Joseph Goebbels was in a less optimistic mood, however. The

German defeat at Stalingrad – announced barely two weeks earlier –

still loomed large in the public consciousness. As the first serious defeat

of German forces, and one in which the Nazis’ time-honoured tactics

of
Blitzkrieg
and encirclement had been successfully employed against

them, Stalingrad gave the German people reason for profound reflec-

tion and concern. The most immediately affected were those who

mourned the loss of their husbands, sons and brothers of the German

6th Army: men who had marched in resplendent triumph through

Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, and who were now either dead or

stumbling into an uncertain fate in Soviet captivity. Beyond that, many

would have worried that such a catastrophic defeat would prove to

be the high-water mark of the German advance – or, indeed, that

Stalingrad would be the beginning of the end.

As Minister for Propaganda, Goebbels was duty bound to counter

such negative opinions; to put an optimistic gloss on events, or at the

very least steel the German people for a year of hardship. Yet, pecu-

liarly, he felt himself hampered by the sudden outbreak of fine weather.

‘Every ray of sunlight’, he wrote in his diary, ‘is an obstacle to the

implementation of measures for total war. I would much prefer it if

winter would prevail for a few more weeks, albeit in a milder form.

to unreason and beyond

337

The worse the image of the war appears, the easier it is to draw the

necessarily harsh consequences.’1 The Propaganda Minister clearly did

not see the world as other Berliners did that day.

That same evening, Goebbels was due to speak at a large public

meeting in the prestigious Berlin Sportpalast: it would be one of the

most important, and indeed infamous, speeches of his life. The venue

was well chosen. The Sportpalast was a huge arena in the southern

suburb of Schöneberg, which had made its name hosting cycling races,

ice hockey and skating, but since 1933 had served exclusively as a venue

for political rallies. For an event of this sort, it could accommodate

up to 14,000 Nazi faithful, seated not only around the banked stands,

but also massed in serried rows on the floor of the hall itself – little

wonder, therefore, that Goebbels described the venue as ‘our political

grandstand’.2

In preparation for the speech, the Sportpalast had been carefully

decorated. Garlands festooned the balcony, interspersed with swastika

banners. At one end of the arena, a large stage had been constructed. A

long, white platform spread across the hall, behind which senior Nazi

dignitaries were seated. At its centre, a Nazi flag and a bank of micro-

phones marked the position of the orator. To the rear, a stylised German

eagle rose above the dais, leading the eye to two more galleries of seating,

divided by a huge banner bearing the legend ‘Total War – Shortest War’

in a florid gothic script.

The crowd, too, had been meticulously prepared. Carefully selected

for its political reliability, it was also intended to represent a cross section

of the German people. Alongside ranks of wounded from the Eastern

Front there were holders of the prestigious Knight’s Cross, nurses, arma-

ments workers, doctors, scientists, artists, engineers, architects and

teachers. As Goebbels would later swoon before them: ‘I see thousands

of German women. The youth is here, as are the aged. No class, no

occupation, no age remain uninvited.’ ‘At this moment’, he would

proclaim to his audience, ‘you represent the whole nation.’3 As he

would also be heard by millions of Germans in their homes, their work-

places and in their barrack blocks, the ‘whole nation’ was indeed listening.

When he took to the stage that evening, Goebbels cut a rather

peculiar figure. Elegantly attired in a double-breasted jacket, with the

obligatory swastika band on his left arm, he seemed rather dwarfed

by the lectern before him. He began his speech in a sombre tone,

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berlin at war

recalling his previous appearance at the Sportpalast, three weeks

earlier, which, he revealed, had been listened to by the remnant of

German troops fighting within Stalingrad. ‘It was a moving experience

for me, and probably also for all of you’, he said, to think that those

‘last heroic fighters . . . perhaps for the last time in their lives joined us

in raising their hands to sing the national anthem.’ He then elaborated

on the meaning of the defeat at Stalingrad; that Bolshevism now im -

perilled not only Germany itself, but all of Western civilisation. Meeting

this threat, he said, was Nazi Germany’s primary duty, for ‘if we fail,

we will have failed in our historic mission. Everything we have built

and done in the past pales in the face of this gigantic task.’

Warming to his theme, and feeding off the growing and vociferous

enthusiasm of his crowd, Goebbels grew louder and more animated

in his delivery – gesticulating to all corners of the hall, posing with

his hands on his hips, or wagging his finger demonstratively. His

mouth, already cavernously wide, appeared to widen still further as

he spoke, until his whole head seemed almost to pivot around his jaw.

His voice, too, increased in intensity, occasionally dropping off to force

his audience to listen more carefully, and at other times rising to a

shriek. He stated that Stalingrad had opened the eyes of the German

people ‘to the true nature of war’. With the future of all of Europe

hanging on the German success in the east, he argued ‘total war is

the demand of the hour’.

The question is not whether the methods are good or bad, but whether

they are successful. The National Socialist government is ready to use

every means. We do not care if anyone objects. We are not willing to

weaken Germany’s war potential by measures that maintain a high,

almost peace-time standard of living for a certain class, thereby endan-

gering our war effort. We are voluntarily giving up a significant part

of our living standard to increase our war effort as quickly and

completely as possible.4

Goebbels proclaimed that bars and nightclubs would be closed forth-

with; luxury stores, too, would be shut down, as they ‘offended the

buying public’. ‘What good are fashion salons today’, he asked, ‘what

good are beauty parlours?’ Luxury restaurants, meanwhile, whose

demand for resources far outstripped what Goebbels considered

to unreason and beyond

339

reasonable, would also be forced to close their doors. ‘We can become