1. The Dwellers in the Dark
They were living their lives either beneath the ground or deep within concrete. They were buried. Somehow, this was endurable. Across the city of Berlin there were a thousand or so specially constructed air-raid shelters, but these could accommodate only a fraction of the city’s population of just under three million. There were also the basements beneath apartment blocks, cellars beneath houses and the stations of the U-Bahn underground system. There were even slit trenches. Subterranean passages – prospects of rough concrete enlivened by angry propaganda posters – offered comfortless sanctuary. Civilians crammed too close together gazed up at curved ceilings or at one another; and they blinked at each muffled boom above that reverberated with a resonance that could be felt in the bones.
By the first week of April 1945, the rhythms of civilian life in Berlin had been sharpened to a point of terrible simplicity: the daylight quest to find rations – any food at all – with silent, near motionless queues that could last for hours. The weary walks through wrecked streets in thinning-soled shoes smothered with dust, entire districts deconstructed and rendered unfamiliar, with new views and prospects and disorientating absences: the cumulative effect of months of heavy bombing. The previous month had seen an especially frenzied raid, as though the Allied bombers had been seeking simply to smash the city into the earth. Even so, in the suburbs there were some factories that had not been shattered by high explosives – worked by huge numbers of forced labourers drawn from across Europe – and that labour continued, albeit with intermittent supplies of electricity and water. The city’s still-functioning power stations continued to hum, tall chimneys exhaling white smoke; the vast and architecturally elegant generating station of Klingenberg, which cast its shadow over the River Spree in the east of the city, was itself kept alive by intelligent forced labourers who were making shrewd calculations about the future of the city and about which of the Allies would be the first to claim it. The U-Bahn was still, somehow, broadly functioning, though only on the lines that had not received direct hits, and strictly for those who needed it for work or military purposes.
With depressing frequency, the weary cry of the city’s air-raid sirens, low and throaty, would begin the race back down to the underworld. Since the autumn of 1943, Allied bombing raids had killed and mutilated thousands, rendering entire streets and districts practically uninhabitable, although there were those who stayed among the ruins, unwilling to leave. Those citizens whose cellars and shelters had not imploded would emerge each morning into days that looked like night; the sky above grey and dense, sometimes ‘smouldering yellow’ with the dust and the ash.1 The air itself seemed burned: unextinguished fires brought fumes from wood and paint and rubber. With handkerchiefs over mouths, mothers and grandmothers looked on as the civil defence authorities retrieved bodies – many in fragments – from beneath the grey brick and stone. Any individual death had lost its sanctity. Mass burials had been efficiently arranged, yet still a pervasive sweetness in the air signalled decay. Clearly, not all the remains had been recovered from the rubble. This was not for want of purpose; the firefighters and the police and other civic workers remained dedicated. Like the hospitals, though, they were overwhelmed. There were instances when ideology dissolved amid destruction. The small Jewish Hospital in the northern suburb of Gesundbrunnen – founded in the eighteenth century and the sole Jewish institution to survive the war in Berlin, chiefly because of its facilities and expertise – was, by the end of the conflict, simultaneously hiding Jewish fugitives and treating gentiles. By contrast, the central Charité Hospital, also founded in the eighteenth century – some of whose doctors had been used by the Nazis in the 1930s to carry out grotesque medical experiments and to euthanize disabled and psychiatric patients – was now extensively smashed; medical supplies and morphine were too sparse to minister to the processions of the wounded. Many in the city, familiar with the landmark of the Charité, did not comprehend just how close to their own daily lives the true terrible eugenic horror of the regime had been.
At the beginning of April 1945 American daylight raids subsided, but the nocturnal attacks by British bombers continued. Many Berliners who had lost their homes in these attacks were dwelling in the shelters through the day and the night; for them, this life in the darkness must have seemed to be the limit of existence. The city’s authorities had anticipated some years beforehand that Berlin might be in need of such sanctuary. Berlin is built upon sandy soil, so was always an awkward prospect for excavation, whether for sewers or for the underground railways that were constructed from the turn of the century onwards. In 1935 the Nazis stipulated that any new building in the city should be designed with a basement that could be used for shelter. The outrage of the first British bomber attack on the city in the autumn of 1940 prompted a ‘Bunker Construction Programme for the Capital of the Reich’. By April 1945, and after eighteen months of sustained bombing from the Allies, a great many of those bunkers and basements had become sealed tombs. Entire streets had collapsed, punched through with thousands of pounds of heavy explosives, leaving infilled basements and passages beneath that rescue teams struggled to enter. One particular hazard that had faced shelterers was bombs hitting water mains; in that instance, their deaths would be caused by drowning, the waters rising to the brick ceilings too fast for them to escape. The U-Bahn stations were similarly vulnerable, the lines running only a few feet below the surface.
Despite such adversity, the keen edge of Berliner humour somehow remained present. The LS initials signifying Luftschutz (air-raid shelter) were said to stand for Lernen schnell Russisch, or ‘Learn Russian quickly’.2 The humour did not quell the fear. Since the beginning of the year, in days when the implacable Berlin frost gave the streets a metallic feel, the city had been teeming with exhausted and traumatized rural refugees. Some had come by rail; others entered the city wearily on roads, negotiating cobbles and icy tramlines, pointing westwards without final aim. They had fled their stolen farmlands in the conquered east, carrying with them the searing memories of those they had left behind who had not escaped the Red Army: the women who were raped repeatedly, many of whom had been later tortured and murdered.
Some Berliner civilians were aware – and fearful – that the vast Soviet forces now gathering in the distance and moving inexorably towards them had themselves witnessed Nazi-inflicted depravities and obscenities, keeping Soviet prisoners of war in open-air pens where an estimated three million or more had been deliberately starved to death under freezing skies. And by August 1944, as they pushed out of Soviet territory and towards Germany, huge numbers of those Red Army soldiers would have read in their newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda a terrifying account of a camp in Poland called Majdanek, written by the soldier and poet Konstantin Simonov. His agonized descriptions of its gas chambers, and of the ‘thousands and thousands of pairs of children’s footwear’3 discarded there, had been among the first searing reports of these atrocities – so searing that some in the British and American authorities did not completely believe them. Rumours of what happened at the death camps had already reached Berlin. Brigitte Lempke, who was a schoolgirl at the time, recalled a classmate pulling her to one side and saying, ‘I have to tell you something, but you must never repeat it, or something very bad will happen.’ Slightly frightened, Brigitte agreed and her schoolfriend told her that her uncle, a doctor, had returned from the east. One night, when the girl was supposed to be in bed, she secretly listened to her uncle talking brokenly to her parents. He was crying, she said. He had seen ovens in which they were going to burn people. The girl offered a vivid simile: ‘just how bread is pushed into the oven, people are pushed into it’.4 It was an image Brigitte could never forget.
And for the Red Army, the nature of those they were seeking to defeat had found even sharper focus with the discoveries of Treblinka and then, in January 1945, of Auschwitz. ‘Liberation’ seemed too exultant a term for the rescue of living skeletons amid the obscene piles of dead bodies. They had also found several mass graves in haunted forests. These young soldiers needed little hardening against their enemy, although their Soviet superiors were initially insisting, through newspapers and radio, that these camps were the responsibility not just of a few Nazi officers, but of German society as a whole. They were emanations of the very nature of the Fatherland. The time would come as the Nazi regime collapsed when the Soviets would reverse this position, insisting that the German working people could not be blamed, but, until this monstrosity was defeated, the soldiers of the Red Army were left to wonder about the humanity of every German civilian they encountered.
The cycle of vengeance had a terrible velocity. In part, at the beginning of April, this was because of tensions between the Allies. The American and the British forces, having fought their way through from the west, were poised to make the final swoop on Berlin. (The Allies had already long decided – with difficulty – upon the division of Berlin and the zones of the defeated capital that each would occupy; negotiations at the European Advisory Commission in London had been ongoing since the autumn of 1943, with figures such as US State Department diplomat Philip E. Mosely haggling with British and Soviet counterparts over ‘hastily pencilled lines’5 on maps.) Now, in the London Daily Telegraph, Lieutenant General H. G. Martin ventured that Hitler’s forces still had some ‘kick left in them’ and that that would prevent Marshal Zhukov’s Red Army getting close. He predicted that either the Americans under General Bradley or the British under Field Marshal Montgomery would be the ones to seize ‘Fortress number 2 Berlin’.6 The British prime minister, Winston Churchill, knew that the conquest of the city would finally extinguish the Nazi flame; but the Americans under the command of General Eisenhower had already silently ceded the race; and President Roosevelt, only days from his own death, and anxious about long-term US entanglement with Europe, was adamant that the race should go to the Soviets. This decision was communicated to Stalin through Eisenhower, and Stalin, perpetually paranoiac, had simply not believed it. He himself had deployed a double bluff to his allies, saying that he no longer considered Berlin to be the highest priority before, on 1 April 1945, telling his senior commanders, Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev, that they must reach Berlin first. Zhukov, forty-eight years old, had been born and raised in a village seventy miles from Moscow. His was a rural, turn-of-the-century childhood in a wide landscape of birch and fast rivers, where dusty poverty was endemic but where there were vividly recalled consolations of fresh-caught fish and summer berries. In this sense, even though Zhukov had been carried and raised by the tides of Russian history and revolution, he was similar to the younger men and women now under his command (although many of these younger people had known the hunger – in some cases famine – caused by Stalin’s 1930s collectivization of farms rather than the oppression of Tsarist smallholdings). Latterly, Zhukov and his forces had seen their beloved lands devastated by the Nazis, and they were now fired by a dreadful, ineluctable energy that held an image of Berlin at its core.
As the news of the Red Army brought by those German refugees who had escaped the violent retributions seeped osmotically among Berliners, there was an understanding that their own idea and image of civilization were shortly to face an unknowable reckoning. In this sense, the impulse to stay burrowed in the twilight of the bomb shelters was a rational response to the terrors of the world outside.
Not all shelters were subterranean. There were striking structures to be found on some street corners, or nestled deep among the trees of the city’s parks. Some were simply anonymous concrete cylinders with sloping roofs, while others took on the shapes of the buildings around them, like offices or flats, yet their rough texture and their blank, tiny windows made them faintly uncanny. Some rose out of the sandy soil of recreational spaces, their entrances simply angled slabs of concrete. Inside were tunnels that would come to a dead end. In the northern district of Wittenau were two concrete bunkers some fifty feet high, square in shape and with simple arched doorways, that evoked even more macabre associations: they resembled grand family mausoleums. In the central Kreuzberg area there stood one of the more ingenious shelters: a huge, round brick gas holder, originally constructed in the nineteenth century, had been converted into the Fichte-Bunker (it lay on Fichtestrasse): walls had been thickened and the unlit interior, reaching up to six storeys, had been divided into 750 small chambers. It was supposed to hold 6,000 people. By the beginning of 1945 it was sometimes holding 30,000. Local Kreuzbergers were joined by helpless rural refugees who had made their entrance into Berlin just as the menacing hum of the approaching bombers could be discerned.
Given their shallow depth, the shelters on the U-Bahn network gave only an illusion of impregnability. Even though at Moritzplatz station there was a further layer of tunnels to be found below the railway, in February 1945 any feeling of security was pulverized in a blink when the station above was hit and thirty-six people were killed instantly.
And across those last eighteen months of the war, it was estimated that some 30,000 civilians had been killed in air raids. The eyes of hundreds of thousands of Berliners had in that time grown accustomed to a world of catacombs, bare bulbs, rough wooden furniture, slop buckets. There were some, though, who could not contain their anger at what they considered the barbarous conduct of a bestial enemy, and the lives that they were being forced to lead. A little time before, photographer Liselotte Purper, who had worked with Goebbels’s propaganda department, wrote to her husband Kurt Orgel, who was stationed east – one of the last letters he would receive before he was killed. ‘Rage fills me!’ she wrote. ‘Think of the brutality with which we will be raped and murdered, think of the terrible misery, which the air terror alone is already bringing upon our country.’7
The majority of those taking shelter were women, many of whom had young children. Part of the exhausting dread inspired by the air-raid sirens was the speed at which unwilling children had to be hauled from their warm beds, dressed and hurried over to the nearest local shelter, sometimes in bulky prams. There was then the need to soothe frightened infants in the weird semi-darkness as the thunderous night rolled in. In the north of the city lay a grand landscaped park, the Humboldthain. It had been named in honour of one of Berlin’s most distinguished historical figures, the pioneering eighteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who had sailed vast oceans in order to analyse the floral and geographic wonders of the world. In times of peace, this park had been a tranquil, flower-dotted contrast to the rough streets that surrounded it. Now it was a site that characterized the city’s deep unease. Despite the fires from ceaseless night-time bombing raids and the depredations of desperate citizens foraging for fuel, there were still rich trees growing here, high against the cold grey skies. But there were stretches of the park lawns that had been cut wide open, trenches zig-zagging like lightning bolts, and looming over all was a vast, square concrete tower, some 200 feet high and wide, crowned with octagonal gun platforms. At night, the tower roof would be manned by teenage boys, with the sparsest of training, pointing anti-aircraft guns impotently at the blazing skies. And inside was where the local citizens ran when the Allied bombers came.
The shape of the Humboldthain flak tower – one of three such structures in the city – was alien and yet disconcertingly familiar. The concrete was brutalist but the narrow windows were suggestive of a centuries-old fortress. Its gloomy interior was suffused with the common reek of humanity. Thousands had been gathering in these shelters on a daily basis across the last few months. Around twenty thousand at most should have packed into those grim storeys, but, in panic, many more pressed their way in. Familiar faces sitting on familiar benches and bunks were joined by strangers in dim, close-aired intimacy. The tower’s low-ceilinged chambers and passages were lit with pale blue bulbs, which gave faces a ghostly pallor. The lavatorial prospects were basic and grim: composting efforts. In the keenest nights of that frosty spring, the vast walls, several feet thick, provided insulation but no ventilation, and the tiny windows were blocked off so that feeble lights might not be detected by the bombers. Along the walls were rows of basic, creaking bunks. To some, the very idea of unbroken sleep would have been satirical. And yet there were families here who had adapted to the new twilight life, leaving the fortress only in order to obtain rationed food. Many had seen their homes demolished under ferocious Allied bombing. The loss was not merely that of a secure roof and shelter but of the accumulated possessions that constituted family memory: the photographs, the old mahogany furniture, the porcelain and the dinner services, all tokens of a certain kind of stability and continuity. Those threads that linked these shelterers to the past were snapped. And this dark concrete tower was now home. Others used it more sparingly, in the most extreme of emergencies, when the bombers were close to the city. They knew it was not a healthy place to be. ‘When the guns on the roof were firing,’ recalled Gerda Kernchen, who was sixteen years old at the time, ‘the whole building would shake, which was very nerve-wracking.’8
The mere fact of the building’s existence – it grew in the skyline of the suburb of Gesundbrunnen in 1943, constructed using forced labour – suggested to a number of Berliners that the course of the war had shifted. By the frozen days of February and March 1945, with Germany’s borders penetrated from east and west, it was an increasingly grim symbol of siege. In this, it was joined by the stark visibility of another flak tower looming over the city’s zoo. In some ways, this shelter had an even more urgent edge: its third floor – a similarly comfortless prospect of bare concrete – housed a field hospital. The facilities and the lights were sparse; one section was used as a maternity ward. Even in the spring of 1945, babies were being born into this cold, war-ravaged city.
A flak tower that stood within the Friedrichshain, in the city’s east, held a ferociously guarded secret: a great mass of art and antiquities taken from Berlin’s Kaiser-Friedrich Museum and other galleries, as well as those stolen from Jewish owners. The art that was hidden in the Friedrichshain tower included works by Caravaggio (‘St Matthew and the Angel’, ‘Portrait of a Courtesan’) and Botticelli (‘Madonna and Child with Saint John’) among others and was almost ludicrously vulnerable. There had been a plan by the start of 1945 to find more secure refuge for the collection of paintings and sculptures in Pomerania (on the northern coast of conquered Poland), though the mercury-fast advance by the Soviets destroyed that idea. A potash mine at Schönebeck (a town about sixty miles to the south-west of Berlin) was the next possibility, but with every available man engaged at arms, and with every able woman working elsewhere, the inclination disappeared. And just weeks previously, after another of the city’s museums was engulfed in the searing flames of incendiaries, yet more works had been placed in the Friedrichshain tower. By March, various museum directors had coordinated a new plan: mines at Grasleben (an area to the west of Berlin and close to Hanover) and Ransbach (in the west of Germany, close to Frankfurt) were to be used. Some of the artworks were packaged carefully and taken out of the city, past vast craters, and into the countryside beyond. The last of these convoys departed on 7 April, leaving many works behind.
Civilians poked around these discarded masterpieces truffling vainly for stored food, for, while the art treasures were being evacuated, the citizens were not. There had never been a suggestion of any concerted effort to find Berliners temporary sanctuary in the towns and villages outside the city. They were effectively prisoners within the city bounds; there was nowhere else for them to go. Conversely, a number of families had, within the last eighteen months, actually returned to Berlin. Among them were children who had previously been spirited away en masse by the authorities to hostels in clear-aired mountain regions. Many were impatient to return to Berlin, as were mothers and grandmothers who pined for the familiar landmarks of home even as those landmarks were vanishing.
The city was defended, even though the Wehrmacht was lethally depleted; since 20 March, Army Group Vistula – there to fight the oncoming Soviet forces – had been led by General Gotthard Heinrici, a fifty-eight-year-old veteran from a family of Protestant theologians, whose powerful Lutheran faith was distrusted by his superiors. Earlier in the war, angry disagreements with the hierarchy had led to a period of forced retirement; now, with the Red Army fifty miles east of Berlin, the rehabilitated Heinrici was tasked with stopping this vast force from successfully crossing the River Oder and sweeping onwards for the capital. While there were urban whispers circulating among sheltering civilians concerning potential new wonder weapons even more powerful than the V-1 and V-2 missiles that had been streaking through the skies above the Channel and causing devastation in London, Gotthard Heinrici was perfectly aware that no such miracle was close. The previous commander of Army Group Vistula – Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler – had allowed himself to be removed from the position having proved haplessly inadequate. The man who had devised the structure for the Holocaust and the obscene means for ending the lives of millions had withdrawn to a private retreat at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium some miles to the north of Berlin, suffering from self-diagnosed influenza. In the city from which he had withdrawn, there were exclamatory public pronouncements issued through street loudspeakers, written by the Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. The minister was exhorting belief. In the early 1920s, Goebbels had understood Berlin as an ‘asphalt monster’ that made people ‘heartless and unfeeling’;9 the asphalt had divorced the Berlin people from their true Germanness; the city had been ‘asphalted by the Jews’.10 By 1926, he was Gauleiter – or regional Nazi Party leader – of the city: a position he retained until his death. In a sly and brilliant analysis of his use of language, the contemporary philologist Victor Klemperer charted Goebbels’s shifting attitudes to Berlin; how the conflict between ‘soil and asphalt’ became tempered and romanticized to the point in 1944 when Goebbels could declare that ‘we have great respect for the indestructible rhythm of life, and the rugged will to live demonstrated by our metropolitan population’.11 Their choice in the matter was limited.
It was also the case that many Berlin citizens were very quietly expressing their own doubts about the new wonder weapons. Behind these seditious whispers – shared with care in a city where fierce surveillance of public behaviour was still rigorously carried out by resident block wardens – lay the leaden coldness of understanding. There would be no reverse, no rescue. The teenage boys firing the rooftop guns enthusiastically but uselessly at high-altitude bombers were collectively known by the initials LH, which stood for Lüften Helfer (air helpers). Those civilians sheltering beneath them interpreted the letters differently (in the manner of Lernen schnell Russisch): they called them Letzte Hoffnung, or last hope. The joke had layers of rueful bitterness. Paradoxically, the oppressively secular society that had been fashioned by the Nazis since the mid 1930s itself stood on a framework of para-religious faith: it required absolute belief in the Führer, and in those who did his work. For this vision of Germany, and Berlin, to cohere, it took faith to believe that the state had the right to complete control over body and mind, and would then use this control to nurture and protect the people. It took faith to believe in miracle weapons. And in those shelters and cellars, the faith was dissolving. There were those who, like General Heinrici, had held on to their Christian belief despite all hostile government efforts to marginalize the Churches and the laity. Theirs was a faith that it was unwise to proclaim too loudly. If they prayed privately, it was in silence.
And yet there were others in the city – underground both literally and metaphorically – who were, despite the frenzy of extermination, holding true to older beliefs and communities. Despite the methodical deportation of the city’s large Jewish population to Auschwitz and other death camps, there were a significant number of Jewish people, possibly 1,700 or so, who contrived to remain in Berlin, hidden. Astonishingly, they had survived. These came to be known in very closed, secretive circles as the ‘U-Boats’.12 Many of these Jewish people had been taken in by gentile friends and associates. Some were obliged to live much of their lives concealed in the almost permanent darkness of basements. One such was Rachel R. Mann, who recalled that she had been out the day the Gestapo came for her and her mother. When she got home, she was taken in by a compassionate neighbour; but in the winter and spring of 1945, as some Nazi functionaries grew ever more hysterical, she was compelled to stay in the cellar. ‘[The neighbour] brought me something to eat every day and sometimes she brought me up to her apartment so that I could take a bath. I was down there until the end of the war.’13
There was Marie Jalowicz-Simon, then Marie Jalowicz, who had been eluding the authorities since 1942, having dodged away from a Gestapo official one morning; later that day, when a postman attempted to deliver a letter to her, she simply told him that her ‘neighbour’ Marie had been deported east. This was scrawled on the envelope and seemed to seep through the city bureaucracy. She was soon to discover – wearing a jacket without a yellow star – that even though she came from a thoroughly middle-class background, the most kindness and generosity were to be found in the city’s working-class districts as she sought factory work.14 By the spring of 1945 she was sheltering in a small house in one of the city’s northern suburbs amid her fellow citizens, a tiny number of whom knew her true identity. She regarded these working-class Berliners as her saviours, and as the true spirit of the city. They understood the enormity of the crime that had been committed by the state, unlike, in Simon’s view, the middle classes, who had capitulated to Nazi philosophy. ‘It was, above all,’ she said, ‘the educated German bourgeoisie who had failed.’15
There were numbers of those ‘educated German bourgeoisie’ who would have argued that they had had no choice, that they did not deserve to share the collective guilt and that their nights spent beneath buildings, waiting for bombs to plummet through, were a form of purgatory or penance.
Racism and enthusiasm for eugenicist theories were not unique to inter-war Germany; such beliefs were so widespread in some circles as to feel natural as well as respectable (King George V’s personal physician Lord Dawson of Penn was just one of many British establishment figures who had an interest in eugenics, as did some prominent left-wing politicians). As these Berliners were forced underground by bombs, very few were reflecting on how their entire society had been poisoned by the obsession with racial superiority and degeneracy. It was still too close to be seen. For some, it would remain so, even after the war.
Copyright © 2022 by Sinclair McKay
