Iron Curtain (10 page)

Even individual responses were often wooden and perfunctory, and so they remained: What was there to say? Many years later, an otherwise eloquent East German pastor who had been a child at the time of the Soviet invasion still slipped and stuttered as he tried to describe what he remembered
of that: “The Russians came, then the rapes happened, it was incredible. One simply cannot forget that. I was fifteen … some women had gone into hiding, they’d got others, my mother, it was very difficult … It was horrible and at the same time there was a feeling of relief, of having escaped alive. There was a strange tension inside me.”
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Only once in Soviet-occupied Europe was mass rape clearly and publicly discussed. In November 1948, the East German authorities organized a public debate on the subject in Berlin’s “
House of Soviet Culture.” The meeting was inspired by the journalist
Rudolf Herrnstadt—editor, at the time, of the
Berliner Zeitung
, the Berlin city newspaper, and later editor of the official party newspaper,
Neues Deutschland
—who had composed a provocative article entitled “About the Russians and About Us.” The debate attracted an enormous crowd, so many that
Neues Deutschland
later complained the hall was “too small to discuss this topic seriously.”

Herrnstadt himself opened the discussion by provocatively repeating the thesis of his article, which had been printed in
Neues Deutschland
a few days before. He declared that Germany “could not overcome its present difficulties without unrestricted support of the USSR,” and he dismissed the public’s anger at and resentment of the Red Army. He belittled those in his audience who spoke of their “brother-in-law who was standing on the side of the road and had his bicycle stolen, and he had been voting for the communists all of his life.” How was the Soviet army supposed to know that the man was a communist? Why wasn’t this man fighting with the Red Army against the Nazis? Why was the entire German working class standing by the side of the road, as it were, waiting to be saved?

The discussion lasted four hours and would be continued the following night. But as the evening wore on, the focus gradually shifted away from stolen bicycles. At a key moment, a woman stood up and declared that “many of us have experienced things that shape our reaction when we meet members of the Soviet army.” Still using euphemisms, she referred to “that fear and this mistrust with which we approach everybody who wears a certain uniform.” Reading the transcript of the debate, it becomes strangely clear that everyone immediately understood that the real subject at hand was not theft but rape.

One by one, justifications for Soviet behavior were presented. Germans must learn to use reason to overcome emotion. Germans must carry on with the class struggle. Germans had begun the war. German brutality had taught the Russians to be brutal. Still, there were a few counterarguments—
some women pushed back, others wanted to know how Russian women were treated at home—until finally, on the second night, a Russian officer stood up and effectively ended the argument. He declared that “no one has suffered as much as we: 7 million people dead, 25 million lost their homes”: “What kind of soldier came to Berlin in 1945? Was he a tourist? Did he come on an invitation? No, that was a soldier who had thousands of kilometers of scorched
Soviet territory behind him … perhaps he found his kidnapped bride here, who had been taken as a slave laborer …”

After this intervention, the public discussion was effectively over: no real response could be made to his argument. His words reminded everyone in the room not only of the German responsibility for the war and of the Red Army’s deep desire for revenge but of the pointlessness of saying or doing anything about it.
³⁸

Official silence followed. But memories of the mass rape, of the looting, and of the violence did not disappear in Germany, in Hungary, in Poland, or anywhere else. They simply added to the “fear and mistrust with which we approach everybody who wears a certain uniform,” in the words of the woman at the Berlin discussion—a fear that persisted long after the violence stopped.
³⁹
With time, it became clear that this peculiarly powerful combination of emotions—fear, shame, anger, silence—helped lay the psychological groundwork for the imposition of a new regime.

Violence was not the only cause of resentment. Within a few years of the war’s end, the Soviet Union would encourage the rapid industrialization of Eastern Europe—but in the meantime Stalin wanted war reparations. In practice, this entailed the literal dismantling of industry across the region, sometimes with very long-term consequences. Like mass rape, the mass plunder of German factories often seems to have been a form of revenge as much as anything else. Equipment and goods that could not possibly have been of any use in the USSR, bits of odd piping and broken machines, were hauled off alongside works of art, the contents of private houses, even masses of archival documents, ancient as well as modern (the archives of the Grand Duchy of Lichtenstein, of the Rothschild family, of the Dutch freemasons), which were of limited use to Soviet scholars. Random men, rounded up on the street for this purpose, were forced to pack up industrial equipment that required specialist treatment, and the goods were surely damaged as a result.

Unlike the thefts of watches and bicycles, these wholesale
reparations were very carefully planned in advance, starting as early as 1943, although Soviet authorities did know what a backlash they might create. Just as the tide of the war was turning, the head of the Soviet Institute for World Economics and World Politics, Eugene Vargas (a Soviet economist of Hungarian origin, also known by his Hungarian name, Jëno Varga), wrote a paper anticipating mass reparations and arguing that they might “alienate the working class”
in Germany and elsewhere if done incorrectly. Vargas thought payments in kind were preferable to payments in cash, which might perhaps involve bankers and capitalism. He also thought that any former Axis state that adopted Soviet-style communism should be absolved from paying reparations altogether.
⁴⁰
Vargas and the Soviet foreign minister,
Vyacheslav Molotov, concluded by proposing a mixed form of reparations: the confiscation of German property outside Germany and radical agricultural reform within Germany, as well as the dismantling of German enterprises and their workforces (which could be brought to the USSR to do forced labor) and the reduction of German living standards to Soviet levels. These policies were later carried out, more or less as Vargas described, in the Soviet zone of Germany.
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The other Allies were aware of these plans. Stalin first spoke about them at the Tehran Conference, and at the Yalta Conference the Soviet delegation even proposed the dismemberment of Germany—the
Rhineland and
Bavaria would become separate states—along with the dismantling of three-quarters of Germany’s industrial equipment, of which 80 percent would go to the Soviet Union. A figure was plucked from the air—$10 billion—which Stalin said was “owed” to the USSR. There was some mild argument, and Churchill pointed out that the harsh sanctions placed on Germany after the
First World War had not exactly produced peace in Europe. But Roosevelt was inclined not to argue. His own Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., was also pushing for the dismemberment and deindustrialization of Germany, which he imagined would become a purely agricultural society.
⁴²
The matter wasn’t resolved in Potsdam either, and discussions of reparations continued through 1947 and although the USSR presented a bill for the total amount of destruction the Nazis had caused in the Soviet Union—$128 billion, to be precise—no treaty to this effect was ever signed.

In the end, it didn’t much matter because no other Allied power was able to influence what the Red Army did in its German occupation zone,
or anywhere else for that matter. By March 1945, a Soviet commission had already drawn up a list of German assets, and by the summer some 70,000 Soviet “experts” had already begun to supervise their removal.
⁴³
According to Soviet Foreign Ministry data collected by
Norman Naimark, 1,280,000 tons of “materials” and 3,600,000 tons of “equipment” had been removed from eastern Germany between the invasion and the beginning of August.
⁴⁴
These numbers may have been plucked from the air, just like Stalin’s figure of $128 billion, though it is reliably known that out of 17,024 medium and large factories identified by the USSR in their zone, more than 4,500 were dismantled and removed. Another fifty or sixty large companies stayed intact but became Soviet companies. Between a third and a half of eastern Germany’s industrial capacity disappeared between 1945 and 1947.
⁴⁵
In a very real sense, this was the beginning of the division of Germany. Although the other Allies certainly “recruited” German scientists and other experts, no comparable removal effort took place in the western zones of Germany. In the wake of Soviet reparations, the economies of the two halves of Germany began immediately to diverge.

Even these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Factories can be counted, but there is no way to track the amount of currency, gold, or even food products removed from the eastern zone. German bureaucrats of the Soviet zone tried to keep track. In the files of the
Department of Reparations some sixty-five cards, with about twenty to thirty entries per card, form a partial record. They include everything from “68 barrels of paint” to geodetic instruments and lenses from the Zeiss Jena optical factory. According to these records, the Red Army even confiscated the feed for the animals from the
Leipzig zoo in October 1945. A few weeks later, the Red Army confiscated the animals as well and apparently took them to
Russia.
⁴⁶

In addition to handing over their property, some companies were also forced to pay the transport costs. Others were forced to sell goods below price: the owner of a carpet factory in
Babelsburg complained, indignantly, that he was required to lower prices for the Red Army. Farmers also complained that they were asked to sell goods to the Russians below the market price, or else not be paid for what they delivered.
⁴⁷
The dismantling of a factory was even sometimes accompanied by the deportation of workers, who were simply put on trains and told to expect new job contracts upon arrival in the USSR.
⁴⁸
Factory owners (as well as the Leipzig zookeeper) demanded compensation for the goods from Berlin, but to no avail. Listeners wrote
letters to the
Deutsche Rundfunk radio station—one of the few visible German authorities at the time—asking the same questions: How would the German administration pay them back for goods taken by the Russians? When would people who worked for the Russians be paid?
⁴⁹

Private property also disappeared, sometimes on the grounds that it was Nazi-owned, whether or not this was actually the case. The Russians sequestered town houses, vacation houses, apartments, and castles—and in their wake so did the German communists, who needed “party headquarters,” holiday homes, and living quarters for their new cadres.
⁵⁰
No private car was safe, and no furniture either. Marshal Zhukov himself was alleged to have furnished several
Moscow apartments handsomely with his personal trophies.

German workers sometimes fought hard to save their factories, often appealing to the communist party, which they hoped could intervene with the Russians. The party leaders of
Saxony wrote to party authorities in 1945 to protest against the dismantling of a company that was the only one able to supply industrial glass for local industry. “If dismantled,” they declared, “it will affect many other companies.” The company appealed to the local Soviet commanders, and to local and provincial party leaders, to no effect, and were now finally writing to the communist party in Berlin, hoping for an intervention. The economic department of the party’s Central Committee received dozens of such letters in 1945 and 1946. In most cases, it couldn’t help.
⁵¹

Even though the scale of payments was greatest there, the collection of
reparations was not unique to Germany. As former Nazi allies, Hungary, Romania, and
Finland also had to pay huge reparations in the form of oil, ships, industrial equipment, food, and fuel.
⁵²
The Hungarian contribution had to be continually revisited because Hungary’s galloping inflation made the prices of things difficult to calculate. Current estimates put the payments at $300 million (in 1938 American dollars) to the USSR, $70 million to Yugoslavia, and $30 million to Czechoslovakia. To put it differently, reparations shipments siphoned off about 17 percent of Hungarian gross domestic product in 1945–46, and a further 10 percent in 1946–47. After that, the reparations payments accounted for about 7 percent of GDP annually until the deliveries ended in 1952.
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There were other costs to Soviet occupation too. Feeding and housing the Red Army on its own proved an enormous burden for the Hungarians, who by the summer of 1945 were complaining that the cost already accounted for 10 percent of the government’s budget and had led to the “complete emptying
of the food stores.” Hungarians also housed and fed some 1,600 nonmilitary Allied officials—Soviet,
American,
British, French—whose costs were not insignificant either. Among the expenses the British and American officials scrupulously presented to their Hungarian hosts were bills for “cars, horses, clubs, holidays, villas, golfing, and tennis courts.” A clutch of florists’ bills caused a great scandal in 1946, when details of these expenses appeared in the communist party’s newspaper,
Szabad Nép
(
Free People
): members of the British and American delegations were sending great quantities of flowers to their new Hungarian girlfriends and expected the Hungarian government to pay.
⁵⁴

No parallel scandal haunted the Soviet delegation because Soviet officials did not present bills. Instead, they treated everything around them as booty, confiscating food, clothes, church treasures, and museum exhibits. They routinely broke into office safes and locked storage boxes, removing bundles of the now worthless Hungarian currency, the pengő. In one celebrated case, an Anglo-American lightbulb factory was dismantled by Soviet officers despite Hungarian protests, and the contents shipped off to the USSR. About a hundred other factories were also taken down in this period of “wild” reparations too.