The Fall of Berlin 1945 (53 page)

Zhukov stood up. 'We invite the German delegation to sign the act of capitulation,' he said in Russian. The interpreter translated, but Keitel, by an impatient gesture, signalled that he had understood and that they should bring him the papers. Zhukov, however, pointed to the end of his table. 'Tell them to come here to sign,' he said to the interpreter.

Keitel stood up and walked over. He ostentatiously removed his glove before picking up the pen. He clearly had no idea that the senior Soviet officer looking over his shoulder as he signed was Beria's representative, General Serov. Keitel put the glove back on, then returned to his place. Stumpff signed next, then Friedeburg.

'The German delegation may leave the hall,' Zhukov announced. The three men stood up. Keitel, 'his jowls hanging heavily like a bulldog's', raised his marshal's baton in salute, then turned on his heel. As the door closed behind them, it was almost as if everybody in the room exhaled in unison. The tension relaxed instantaneously. Zhukov was smiling, so was Tedder. Everybody began to talk animatedly and shake hands. Soviet officers embraced each other in bear hugs. The party which followed went on until almost dawn, with songs and dances. Marshal Zhukov himself danced the
Russkaya
to loud cheers from his generals. From inside, they could clearly hear gunfire all over the city as officers and soldiers blasted their remaining ammunition into the night sky in celebration. The war was over.

27
Vae Victis!

Stalin saw the capture of Berlin as the Soviet Union's rightful reward, but the yield was disappointing and the waste terrible. A key target was the Reichsbank in Berlin. Serov accounted for 2,389 kilos in gold, twelve tons of silver coin and millions in banknotes from countries which had been occupied by the Axis. Yet the bulk of Nazi gold reserves had been moved westwards. Serov, however, was later accused of having also held back a certain proportion of the proceeds for the NKVD's 'operational expenses'.

The main objective was to strip Germany of all its laboratories, workshops and factories. Even the NKVD in Moscow provided a shopping list of items wanted from police forensic laboratories. The Soviet atomic programme, Operation Borodino, had the very highest priority of all, but considerable efforts were also made to track down V-2 rocket scientists, Siemens engineers and any other skilled technicians who could help the Soviet armaments industry catch up with the United States. Only a few, such as Professor Jung and his team who refused to help on nerve gas, managed to resist Soviet pressure. Most of the others enjoyed comparatively privileged conditions and the right to bring their families with them to the Soviet Union.

German scientific equipment, however, turned out to be rather less tractable than its human designers. The vast majority of items taken back to Moscow were of no use because they required an environment suitable for precision engineering and the purest raw materials. 'Socialism cannot benefit itself,' observed one of the Soviet scientists involved in stripping Berlin, 'even when it takes the whole of another country's technological infrastructure.'

Most of the programme of stripping laboratories and factories was marked by chaos and disaster. Red Army soldiers who discovered methyl alcohol drank it and shared it with their comrades. The contents of workshops were ripped out by working parties of German women, then left in the open, where they rusted. Even when finally transported back to the Soviet Union, only a small proportion was ever put to good use.

Stalin's theory of industrial expropriation showed itself to be worse than futile. And this came on top of the Red Army's less than enlightened attitude towards German property in general. French prisoners of war were astonished at 'the systematic destruction of machinery in good repair which could be reused'. It was a huge dissipation of resources and condemned Soviet-occupied Germany to a backwardness from which it never recovered.

Personal looting continued to be just as wasteful as it had been in East Prussia, although it now became more exotic. Soviet generals behaved like pashas. Vasily Grossman described one of Chuikov's corps commanders during the last few days of the battle. This general had acquired 'two dachshunds (nice fellows), a parrot, a peacock and a guinea fowl which travel with him', he jotted in his notebook. 'It's all very lively at his headquarters.'

Most of a general's loot consisted of presents from subordinate commanders, who quickly grabbed the best items for their superiors when a schloss or fine house was taken. Zhukov was given a pair of Holland Holland shotguns. They were later to form part of Abakumov's attempt to discredit him, almost certainly on Stalin's instructions. These two guns became, with that Stalinist compulsion to multiply everything in a denunciation, 'twenty unique shotguns made by Golland Golland [
sic
]'. At the other end of the chain of command, Red Army soldiers accumulated an interesting array of plunder. Young women soldiers were interested in assembling a trousseau 'from some Gretchen', hoping that they still might find a husband in a world short of men. Married soldiers collected cloth to send back to their wives, but also looted 'Gretchen knickers'. This sort of present confirmed the worst jealousies at home. Many Soviet wives were convinced that German women in Berlin were seducing their husbands.

Most soldiers, however, concentrated on items for rebuilding at home, despite the fact that they were too heavy for their five-kilo allowance.

An officer told Simonov that his men removed panes of glass, then fastened a bit of wood on each side and bound them up with wire to send home. He recounted the scene at the Red Army post department. 'Come on, take it!' the soldier said. 'Come on, Germans smashed my house. Come on, take the parcel. If you don't, you're not the post department.'

Many sent a sack of nails. Someone brought a saw, rolled into a circle.

'You could at least have wrapped it in something,' a soldier in the post department told him.

'Come on, take it! I've no time. I've come from the front line!'

'And where's the address?'

'On the saw. Here, see?' The address was written in indelible pencil on the blade.

Other soldiers bribed German women with bread to sew their booty up in a sheet to make a parcel. It was a matter of pride to distribute gifts of distinction to family and friends at home, such as hats or watches.

The obsession with watches prized them above far more valuable items. Soldiers would often wear several timepieces, with at least one on Moscow time and another on Berlin time. It was for this reason that they continued to prod civilians in the stomach with their sub-machine guns, demanding, '
Uri, uri!'
well after the surrender. And Germans would try to explain in the Soviet version of pidgin-German that their watches had already been taken: '
Uhr schon Kamerad
' - 'watch already surrender'.

Russian boys, some as young as twelve, turned up in Berlin to loot.

Two of them, when arrested, admitted that they had come all the way from Vologda, well to the north of Moscow. Less surprisingly, foreign workers, in a carnival atmosphere, were responsible for a 'considerable amount of looting' in all liberated areas, a US Army report stated. 'The men head for the wine cellars, the women for the clothing shops and both gather whatever food they can on the way.' But 'much of the looting attributed to foreigners is actually being carried out by the Germans themselves'.

The German loathing and fear of forced labourers were visceral. They were horrified when the Western Allies insisted that they should be fed first. 'Even the Bishop of Minister,' Murphy wrote to the Secretary of State on 1 May, 'is quoted as referring to all displaced persons as Russians and demanding that the Allies should afford Germany protection from these "inferior peoples".' Contrary to German expectations, however, forced labourers were responsible for surprisingly little violence, when one considers how they had suffered after their deportation to Germany.

In Berlin, the feelings of the civilian population were very mixed.

While embittered by the looting and rape, they were also astonished and grateful for the Red Army's major efforts to feed them. Nazi propaganda had convinced them that they would be systematically starved. General Berzarin, who went out and chatted with Germans queuing at Red Army field kitchens, soon became almost as much of a hero to Berliners as he was to his own men. His death in a drunken motorcycle accident soon afterwards provoked widespread sadness and rumours among the Germans that he had been murdered by the NKVD.

Germans were surprised by a less altruistic form of food aid. Soviet soldiers turned up with chunks of meat and told housewives to cook it for them in return for a share. Like all soldiers, they wanted 'to get their feet under a table' in a real kitchen in a real home. They always brought alcohol with them too. Everyone would drink solemnly to peace after eating, and then the soldiers would insist on a toast 'to the ladies'.

The worst mistake of the German military authorities had been their refusal to destroy alcohol stocks in the path of the Red Army's advance.

This decision was based on the idea that a drunken enemy could not fight. Tragically for the female population, however, it was exactly what Red Army soldiers seemed to need to give them courage to rape as well as to celebrate the end of such a terrible war.

The round of victory celebrations did not signify an end to fear in Berlin. Many German women were raped as a part of the extended celebrations. A young Soviet scientist heard from an eighteen-year-old German girl with whom he had fallen in love that on the night of 1 May a Red Army officer had forced the muzzle of his pistol into her mouth and had kept it there throughout his attack to ensure her compliance.

Women soon learned to disappear during the 'hunting hours' of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning, when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before.

Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughters.

Berliners remember that, because all the windows had been blown in, you could hear the screams every night. Estimates from the two main Berlin hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000 rape victims. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to be much higher among the 1.4 million who had suffered in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least 2 million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape. A friend of Ursula von Kardorff and the Soviet spy Schulze-Boysen was raped by 'twenty-three soldiers one after the other'. She had to be stitched up in hospital afterwards.

The reactions of German women to the experience of rape varied greatly.

For many victims, especially protected young girls who had little idea of what was being done to them, the psychological effects could be devastating. Relationships with men became extremely difficult, often for the rest of their lives. Mothers were in general far more concerned about their children, and this priority made them surmount what they had endured. Other women, both young and adult, simply tried to blank out the experience. 'I must repress a lot in order, to some extent, to be able to live,' one woman acknowledged, when refusing to talk about the subject. Those who did not resist and managed to detach themselves from what was happening appear to have suffered much less. Some described it in terms of an 'out-of-body' experience. 'That feeling,' wrote one, 'has kept the experience from dominating the rest of my life.'

A robust cynicism of the Berlin variety also seemed to help. 'All in all,' wrote the anonymous diarist on 4 May, 'we are slowly beginning to look upon the whole business of rape with a certain humour, albeit of the grimmer kind.' They noted that the Ivans went for fatter women first of all, which provided a certain
schadenfreude
. Those who had not lost weight were usually the wives of Nazi Party functionaries and others who had profited from privileged positions.

Rape had become a collective experience — the diarist noted — and therefore it should be collectively overcome by talking among themselves. Yet men, when they returned, tried to forbid any mention of the subject, even out of their presence. Women discovered that while they had to come to terms with what had happened to them, the men in their lives often made things far worse. Those who had been present at the time were shamed at their inability to protect them. Hanna Gerlitz gave in to two drunk Soviet officers to save both her husband and herself.

'Afterwards,' she wrote, 'I had to console my husband and help restore his courage. He cried like a baby.'

Men who returned home, having evaded capture or been released early from prison camps, seem to have frozen emotionally on hearing that their wife or fiancee had been raped in their absence. (Many prisoners who had been in Soviet camps for longer periods also suffered from 'desexualization' as a result of starvation.) They found the idea of the violation of their women very hard to accept. Ursula von Kardorff heard of a young aristocrat who immediately broke off his engagement when he learned that his fiancee had been raped by five Russian soldiers.

The anonymous diarist recounted to her former lover, who turned up unexpectedly, the experiences which the inhabitants of the building had survived. 'You've turned into shameless bitches,' he burst out. 'Every one of you. I can't bear to listen to these stories. You've lost all your standards, the whole lot of you!' She then gave him her diary to read, and when he found that she had written about being raped, he stared at her as though she had gone out of her mind. He left a couple of days later, saying that he was off to search for food. She never saw him again.

A daughter, mother and grandmother who were all raped together just outside Berlin consoled themselves with the idea that the man of the house had died during the war. He would have been killed trying to prevent it, they told themselves. Yet in reality few German men appear to have demonstrated what would admittedly have been a futile courage.

One well-known actor, Harry Liebke, was killed by a bottle smashed over his head as he tried to save a young woman sheltering at his apartment, but he appears to have been fairly exceptional. The anonymous diarist even heard from one woman in the water-pump queue that when Red Army soldiers were dragging her from the cellar, a man who lived in the same block had said to her, 'Go along, for God's sake! You're getting us all into trouble.'

If anyone attempted to defend a woman against a Soviet attacker it was either a father or a young son trying to protect his mother. 'The thirteen-year-old Dieter Sahl,' neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after the event, 'threw himself with flailing fists at a Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot.'

Perhaps the most grotesque myth of Soviet propaganda was the notion 'that German intelligence left a great number of women in Berlin infected with venereal diseases with the purpose of infecting Red Army officers'. Another NKVD report specifically ascribed it to
Werwolf
activity. 'Some members of the underground organization,
Werwolf
, mostly girls, received from their leaders the task to harm Soviet commanders and render them unfit for duty.' Even just before the attack from the Oder, Soviet military authorities explained the increase in VD rates on the grounds that 'the enemy is prepared to use any methods to weaken us and to put our soldiers and officers out of action'.