Exorcising Hitler (25 page)

A schoolgirl who kept a diary at this time recorded the progression of events during the siege with a chilling matter-of-factness:

22.4. Sleeping in the cellar. The Russians have reached Berlin.

25.4. No water! No gas! No light!

26.4. Artillery fire!

27.4. The enemy has reached Kaiserplatz [in the suburb of Wilmersdorf].

28.4. Our building received its 4th artillery hit.

29.4. Our building has approximately 20 hits. Cooking is made very difficult by the ongoing threat to life and limb if you leave the cellar.

30.4. When the bomb hit, I was at the top of the cellar steps with Frau B. The Russians have arrived. Rapes at night. I not; mother, yes. Some, 5–20 times.

1.5. Russians are going in and out. All the watches are gone. Horses are lying on our beds in the courtyard. The cellars have been broken into.

2.5. The first night of calm. We have come from hell into heaven. We cried when discovered the blooming lilacs in the courtyard. All radios must be turned in.

6.5. Our building has 21 hits. Cleaned up and packed the whole day. At night, storm. Hid under the bed out of fear that the Russians would come. But the building just rattled from the shelling.

7.5. Swept the street clear. Went to get ration coupons for bread, picked up, cleaned.

8.5. Swept the street. Stood in line for bread. Report that Papa is still alive.

9.5. Ceasefire. There is milk for Margit.
³⁹

All the same, reflecting the unpredictable mix of brutality and humanity that so many observers have noted of the Russian character, there were plenty of instances where compassion could be and was shown, and even a kind of odd respect for things German that was not necessarily present among the other Allied troops.

So, for instance, during the last days of the war, when the bombed-out city of Dresden finally fell to the Russians, a teenage inhabitant of Löschwitz, a pleasant and historic suburb of the city, found himself, to his terror, surprised by two Soviet officers in what he took to be NKVD uniforms. Expecting to be arrested, or worse, he was instead greeted by a polite request, in near-perfect German, for directions to the little summer house overlooking the Elbe where the great German poet Friedrich Schiller had written his famous
Ode to Joy
a century and a half earlier. The officer and his colleagues were under orders to secure it, as an important cultural monument, from damage during the Red Army’s occupation of the area.
⁴⁰

On the other side of the city, the fortunes of eighteen-year-old Götz Bergander’s family were favoured by two factors: first that the two Russian maids who worked for the household spoke well to the first Red Army soldiers of the Berganders’ kindness to them; and second – more enduringly – that the family lived in a flat on the premises of the distillery where Bergander senior, a chemist, was technical director. With so much alcohol available, the Russian commander was fearful that his men would get totally out of control. He put a twenty-four-hour guard on the entire production facility, which had the additional effect of protecting the family’s residence as well during the critical, chaotic days when most of the rapes and robberies occurred elsewhere.
⁴¹

Although as a Hitler Youth leader he had been pressed into forced labour for a while by the victors, Lothar Löwe, sixteen at the end of the war, recalled that, once the mayhem accompanying the fall of Berlin was over, many ordinary Russians ‘were . . . nice people on a personal level’. The French were worse, in his experience.
⁴²
A woman in Berlin noted that ‘the Russians always gave children something to eat, the kids could get anything they wanted from them. They were always very nice to kids, never cruel.’
⁴³

There were other surprises, some quite bizarre or surreal. Some women who had been hiding in a leafy apartment block near what is now the Stresemannstrasse, not far from the Potsdamer Platz in the city centre of Berlin, were concerned when the horse-drawn baggage train of a Soviet tank regiment set up its carts in the gardens surrounding the flats. Their horses could be hobbled and grazed among the lawns. Within a short time, the German women and the Russians – who included some female soldiers as well as men – came into conversation. The area was peaceful now, with the fighting finally over. One of the German women, who knew a little Russian, screwed up her courage and approached them. They had some food but nothing to cook it with. The German woman offered to help, and duly cooked the Soviet sergeant major and his band a meal, which the ‘enemy’ happily shared with her and her two female companions.

Within a short time, ‘we few Germans were moving freely through the area. The Russians showed us pictures of their families, we laughed together. It was incredible, that something like this could happen, after all those terrible days.’ When the baggage train moved on, the sergeant major gave the woman a scribbled note in Russian, a kind of rough-and-ready letter of safe conduct, which declared: ‘This apartment is occupied by tank troops. Guard-Sergeant-Major Abdulguyzn, Boris N., field post nr. 39907.’

During this same period, perhaps in some kind of recompense for the behaviour of Soviet troops during the fall of the city – or at least in awareness of the bad feeling this had caused – the new Russian commandant in Berlin, Colonel-General Berzarin, provided for Russian army rations to be diverted to feeding the German civilians eking out an existence among the ruins. He also quickly organised, a little more than a week after the capitulation, an exhibition of major possessions of Berlin’s bomb-shattered museums in temporary quarters and, on 26 May, facilitated the first post-war concert by the Berlin Philharmonic.
⁴⁴

None of these expressions of basic decency did, or could, mitigate the results of the mass rape that had occurred throughout the Soviet area of advance and, most terribly, in Berlin at the time of the city’s downfall. The violation of the bodies of tens, even hundreds of thousands of German women would have both short- and long-term consequences. Short, in terms of a huge rise in venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies (the so-called
Russenkinder
, or ‘Russian-children’), and long in the sense of permanent damage to Russian–German relations. It effected the alienation of most Germans in the Soviet-occupied areas of the country from the occupying power, and reinforced their resistance to attempts on the part of the Russians and their German communist allies to install, by persuasion if possible, but if not by force, their chosen political system.

During this interval – say, the twelve to eighteen months following the end of the war – the bizarre difference between the Germany policy of the Western Allies and that of the Soviets was, in effect, that the Russians were quite clear about what they wanted (that is, quite logically, to encourage socialist/communist developments in Germany), while for their part the Western powers seemed bent on radical post-war plans that were not in any way patterned on their own social and political systems.

So, the Morgenthau Plan for Germany was much more radical than the strip-and-socialise Soviet proposals, involving as it did the putative dismantling of two hundred years of German history and the country’s forced transformation into some sort of harmless pre-industrial community of self-reliant yeoman farmers – totally unlike the modern United States, although arguably owing something to romantic notions of the American Midwest’s rural virtues.

An article in
Time
magazine appraising the Anglo-American preparations to withdraw from their forward positions and back into their agreed zones, at the beginning of July 1945, showed a surprisingly critical point of view on this issue, and even more surprisingly was headlined with the title of a famous essay by Lenin (‘What Is to Be Done?’):

With complicated move and counter-move, the four occupying powers settled down last week to the task of ruling conquered Germany . . .

. . . the British and Americans were still united by a common lack of policy: long-range policies were still either undecided or secret. Ordinary soldiers of the occupation armies were beginning to ask: what’s going to be done with Germany? Will it be permanently divided into small states? With political activity banned, how can a democratic Germany develop?

Beyond the movement of Russian prisoners from west to east, there was still no apparent coordination of policy between the western allies and Russia. While the Russians were winning friends and influencing Germans in the east, Germans in the west were beginning to show open hostility to the occupying armies.
⁴⁵

The reference to the Russians’ ‘winning friends’ in the east was perhaps a little over-indulgent – maybe Western reporters were not yet fully aware of the savagery of the Soviet excesses there. However, there was an element of truth in it. For all the Red Army’s disastrous bad behaviour, and, in the microcosm, the touch-and-go nature of personal relations between Germans and their Russian occupiers, the defeated Germans quickly discerned the fairly brutal straightforwardness of Russian policy in the macrocosm. For some this was more attractive or at least more bearable than Western ambiguity and confusion.

Nor was there, at the beginning, any anti-fraternisation policy in the Soviet Zone (another reason why, perhaps naively, the
Time
journalist thought that the Russians must be increasing their popularity among the locals). Soviet officers were routinely billeted with German families, and this not infrequently led to friendly personal relations with their hosts. One German observer wrote that ‘in many German families, single Russians have acclimatised well and act like sons in the house’.

And of course this initial lack of restrictions facilitated relationships between Soviet troops and the local girls and women. Initially, during the ‘wild’ period following the fall of Berlin, many German women, desperate to avoid repeated rape, realised that their best chance lay in finding themselves a Red Army officer and embarking on an exclusive sexual relationship with him, in the often-fulfilled hope that this would protect them from the mass of the soldiery.

Marta Hillers, a widely travelled journalist in her thirties, kept a diary between April and June 1945, coolly detailing her experiences and those of her friends as the Russians fought for and captured Berlin (it was later published, first in English and only later in German, when it caused a considerable scandal). She suffered the rapes stoically. ‘I laugh right in the middle of all this awfulness,’ she wrote. ‘What should I do? After all, I am alive, everything will pass!’ All the same, she saw no reason not to protect herself, and made the hard-headed decision to find a tolerable Russian, as senior in rank as possible, and make him the ‘special one’.

Hillers was lucky enough to find, first a rather mercurial, bull-like lieutenant, succeeded when he was posted on by a cultured and intelligent army major, whom she actually found quite pleasant company. ‘I like the major,’ she wrote, ‘and the less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person’ –

And he won’t be wanting much, I can tell. His face is pale. His knee wound is causing him trouble. He’s probably not so much after sexual contact as human companionship, female company – and I’m more than willing to give him that. For out of all the male beasts I’ve seen these past few days, he’s the most bearable, the best of the lot.
⁴⁶

After a few more weeks had passed, more natural relationships developed – or at least as natural as was possible in the state of inequality that existed between conquerors and conquered, where considerations of access to food, fuel and cigarettes always lurked in the background of the simple man–woman attraction.

Lieutenant Wladimir Gelfand was a Russian of Jewish extraction, commander of a mortar platoon that accompanied the infantry all the way from Stalingrad to Warsaw and then to Berlin. Born in 1923, he had been brought up in modest circumstances as the son of a factory foreman and a kindergarten teacher in the industrial eastern Ukraine. From childhood, he had been a studious boy, interested in literature, philosophy and poetry, and, despite his studies being interrupted by the outbreak of war and his conscription into the army, retained a certain intellectual bent. He would spend his life wanting, in vain, to make a career as a writer.

So, Lieutenant Gelfand, though he had served courageously for three years at the front by the time he reached Berlin, was hardly the caricature of the crude, lustful peasant. He did, however, like young women very much, and – perhaps influenced by the fact that he had been blessed with dark, almost matinee idol-quality good looks – they liked him too. Even, or especially, the German ones.

Gelfand kept a diary. It is a very frank one, in sexual matters as in others. He could be pushy, and not above using his position to gain favours, but there is, quite credibly, never any suggestion of compulsion, let alone force, in his relations with the girls he meets during his time in Germany (January 1945–autumn 1946). That does not mean he is unaware of what is going on. And he is appalled by the brutal attitude of some of his comrades. On the outskirts of Berlin towards the end of April, he too found himself subjected to pleas from an attractive young woman – supported by her mother – to take him as her exclusive sexual property in order to save her from worse. The girl had already been raped in the cellar of her family’s house by a gang of Red Army soldiers: