World War II Behind Closed Doors (60 page)

He was a teenager at the time, and had played little part in the conduct of the war. He had not fought in the German armed forces, but, like most young men, had joined the Hitler Youth. Now, the differences in style and substance between the occupying powers were very obvious to him: ‘We saw Frenchmen who were not very well disposed towards us, we saw English who were friendly, but very distant, very reserved. We saw Americans who were the most accessible of all the Allied forces. We liked that best – we liked their style’. As for the Soviet forces, he was deeply wary of them. ‘I knew that in the first days [of the occupation] my aunt had been raped. My other aunt, they just ripped the jewellery off her – didn't just take it off, they ripped it off her body. We never encountered individual soldiers – they were always in groups. What you saw was that vodka played a big role. They were very noisy. You'd see lorries with stuff they'd looted – furniture, even bits of wood, everything. That didn't seem normal to us. All of this was not something you could see in the Western sectors. They [the Soviet troops] took out of the houses what they could’.

In the months immediately after Potsdam, Schmidtchen and his friends wrestled with a new concept – ‘democracy’. ‘We tried to interpret the word “democracy” [but] we couldn't quite imagine how it would look in practical terms…’. When he attended a
Communist Party meeting, he discovered that it was ‘similar to what we knew before [under the Nazis]. Commands were issued. Other people had to listen’. It was only many months later, when he went to a meeting of the Socialist SPD in West Berlin, outside the Soviet sector, that he realized that ‘democracy’ could mean the freedom to voice your own opinions.

He and his friends started putting posters up for the SPD in East Berlin, but by the spring of 1946 his activities had come to the attention of the Soviet authorities. ‘It was Saturday 9th May and I was about to leave the house when a German police officer approached me and asked my name, and then he told me on Monday I was to go to Russian headquarters. I asked him quite casually: “Why should I go there?” and he said: “Well, they want to question you”. I asked him did I have to take anything with me, and he said: “No, you'll be back by lunch”’.

As a result of this reassurance, he was ‘fairly cheerful’ when he walked over on Monday to the Soviet headquarters. But when he arrived and a guard took him upstairs ‘suddenly I had the feeling that I had done something wrong. I felt sort of hot, although I didn't know what lay ahead’. He was questioned by a Soviet major, via an interpreter. ‘He first asked me for my [identity] cards and then how things were – if I had enough to eat, that kind of thing. Until he suddenly said why were we against the Communists and the Russians? My question was, who were “we”? He ignored that and kept asking. He stayed quite calm. The interpreter became loud – she translated very loudly. I only listened to half of what she said, [and] the whole thing lasted about two hours’.

After this first interrogation he was taken downstairs to a cellar in the basement of the building. ‘There was a bulb of maybe fifteen watts, and this terrible, terrible smell…my eyes got used to the bad light…there were people there and I squeezed myself between them…I felt like I was completely numb, I didn't know what to think’. There were seventeen people crammed into the cellar, and Schmidtchen realized that ‘a few had already been in that cellar for three or four months and hadn't been able to wash themselves’. His life had been transformed in an instant. He had
thought that he had only to answer a few questions and then be home in time for lunch. Now, ‘I was so disappointed. I was seventeen years old. I really didn't know what was going to become of me. If I would ever come out’.

After fourteen days in the cellar, at three o'clock in the morning, Schmidtchen was called out for his second interrogation. This time both the interrogator and the interpreter were different. But the questions were essentially the same – ‘why we were against the Red Army and the Communists’. He tried to explain his interest in politics, but the female interpreter grew angry and beat him first with her fists and then ‘she took off her high heels and hit me in the neck with that. I've got a big scar there today…. After a while I was taken back to the cellar… the next morning my hair was cut off. That was the moment when I knew that I am in the same situation as the others. I'm nobody special here…. I didn't want to believe in evil – that you could be locked up when you're innocent. I really didn't want to believe in that. So that was a bit of hope. But every night when some people came back from their interrogations it did dawn on me that they were trying to break us. They were trying to destroy us. That maybe we might admit things that weren't true. I know that many did that. They were just so desperate. They were so afraid of being beaten [and of] the water cells [where prisoners were confined in small cells partly filled with water], and the pretend tribunals where they were sentenced to death [where prisoners were lied to, and told they were about to be shot]’.

Schmidtchen was imprisoned in a variety of Soviet-run jails in East Germany. Conditions were appalling. In late 1946, for example, prisoners' rations were halved. ‘They'd been insufficient before. But suddenly we just got a half litre of clear soup and a piece of bread. This was a death sentence. This was on 5 November 1946. From this time onwards to March the death rate was so large that even the Russians were shocked. In those months, I cannot remember a day when nobody died…. The only thought you have in the morning is will you get enough to eat today – to survive this day. We didn't believe we would ever be free again. We
were vegetating. There were many moments when I would not have cared if I had died’.

Schmidtchen was finally released after more than eight years of captivity, having been brutally punished for the crime of wanting ‘democracy’. Today he feels ‘less rage now about those who had us taken there and locked us up. My rage is more with the people in present-day Germany who think about this time in contrast with that, and give people from that time high pensions and almost mock the victims. I've written not long ago to certain politicians, [saying] with the knowledge I now have I would not once try to do something for democracy and hang up posters. I would not do that’.

During their attempt to suppress any dissent and exercise control over their zone of occupation, the Soviets made use of what was left of the Nazi infrastructure – including concentration camps. John Noble,
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who in 1945 was a twenty-two-year-old American citizen, was one of those who discovered this truth when he was imprisoned after the war in Buchenwald concentration camp just outside Weimar, within the Soviet Zone of Germany.

During the war he had lived with his family in Dresden, where his father owned a camera factory. They were all American citizens, and although not imprisoned by the Nazis, they were effectively interned: from 1939 their movement was restricted to the city of Dresden, and from 1941 they had to report regularly to the police.

In the spring of 1945, when the Red Army arrived in Dresden, the Soviets committed atrocities in direct view of the Nobles' family home: ‘In the house next to ours, Soviet troops went in and pulled the women out on the street, had mattresses that they pulled out, and raped the women. The men had to watch, and then the men were shot. Right at the end of our street a woman was tied on to a wagon wheel and was terribly misused…. Of course you had the feeling that you wanted to stop it, but there was no possibility to do that’. The open abuse of women and the general looting of the city continued for at least three weeks before a semblance of order returned. Even after this period, the Nobles regularly heard reports that women who worked in their camera factory had been assaulted on their journey to and from work.

To begin with, the Nobles believed that they themselves – and their factory – were relatively safe. They flew the Stars and Stripes over the factory roof and trusted in their American citizenship to protect them. But in the autumn of 1945 both John Noble and his father were arrested as they returned from West Germany, where they had been arranging a transport of camera lenses. The exact motive for their arrest is unclear, although John Noble believes that simple avarice is the most likely explanation – the Soviet authorities just wanted to control the camera factory themselves.

John and his father were sent first to Dresden prison, where they were incarcerated without charge. And because John served as a prison clerk he learnt first hand of the treatment meted out to his fellow inmates. In the first place, he was shocked to discover that children were imprisoned along with adults. ‘Take, for example, a ten-year-old boy who was accused of blowing up a bridge’, he says. ‘He said he didn't do it, and he was tortured. The doctor and I had to take him from the interrogation room back to his cell, and tried to patch him up as good as we could. He was called again. He again denied blowing up the bridge, was again tortured. The third time he couldn't take the torture any more and so he said: “Ok, I blew up the bridge”. So they left him in peace for a while, but still in prison. And then they called him again and they said: “Look, we found out that bridge was never blown up. You lied to a Soviet officer. Because you lied to him we're going to give you ten years”. He died in prison’.

Just as Heinz Jörgen Schmidtchen experienced starvation rations in Soviet captivity, so did John Noble. ‘In Dresden prison I went through a starvation period – the whole prison went through a starvation period. During the night someone called from another cell. I could hear an echo in the prison hall: “If there was a God in heaven, he wouldn't let this happen”…. And as I lay down on my bunk – it was the fifth or sixth day [of the starvation period] and I don't remember exactly – I prayed and I said: “Lord, close my eyes and keep them closed. I can't stand it any more, but if there is a life for me it's not mine – mine's over with. If there's a life, it's all yours”. And that's when everything changed’.

It was this new spiritual strength, Noble believes, that helped sustain him through the weeks of near-total starvation. And when he was moved to Buchenwald in the autumn of 1948 he found conditions almost as bad as in Dresden prison. All around him people were dying. And the prisoners resorted to any method they could in order to gain a morsel more of food. ‘In those barracks where people were literally dying, the guard would go through and touch the toe [of the prisoners lying in their bunks], and if it was still warm then he'd count [as someone to get the small daily ration of food]…. So the prisoners tried to keep the toe [of a dead prisoner] warm… so that when the guard went through he thought: “He's still alive,” so the food ration was there the next day’.

John Noble was fortunate to survive, because under the Soviet administration of Buchenwald more than seven thousand people died. And though many of those imprisoned at Buchenwald by the Soviets were former Nazi functionaries, there were also several prisoners who had been victims of Nazism. ‘Two people in the barracks that Dad and I were in had been here during the Nazi period. Not as guards but as prisoners. And when you'd ask them: “What's the difference?” they'd say: “There is no difference between then and now”. But I'd say: “How come? If you were a prisoner then, how come you're a prisoner now?” [And they replied] “Yeah, well, when you're against the regime you run into that danger of being arrested”’.

When Buchenwald was finally closed by the Soviets in 1950 the inmates were transferred to a variety of other penal institutions. John Noble was sent to the labour camp complex at Vorkuta in the northern Urals. He was not released until 1955, by which time he had served more than nine years in prison. ‘I can't say it any other way than you're numbed against the injustice’, he says, talking of his whole experience. ‘Because everything around you was injustice. Not only in the camp – everywhere the Russians were there was injustice. It's just a matter of trying to survive to get this thing over with’.

By the time John Noble was in Buchenwald, in the late 1940s,
the division of Europe was complete. Soviet-dominated regimes existed in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and more ‘independent’ Communist regimes (though still influenced by Stalin) had taken root in Yugoslavia and Albania.

In 1947 the Marshall Plan had been announced by the United States – a gigantic package of economic aid for Europe. It marked the death of the vindictive anti-German sentiments that had inspired the Morgenthau Plan. It was also the end of any pretence that Europe was not divided. Once it was clear that in order to benefit from the Marshall Plan any eligible country had to also subscribe to concepts alien to Stalin – like free trade and human rights – the Soviet leader demanded that all Eastern European countries reject the proposed American aid.
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Instead, Stalin announced the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), which linked the Eastern bloc economically but provided no aid from the Soviet Union on the scale of the Marshall Plan. Within months, the Sovietization of much of eastern Europe had also taken place – the last steps on the path to Communism had, in the end, been travelled swiftly. With the creation of the military alliances of NATO (1949) for the West and the Warsaw Pact (1955) for the East, the battle lines of the Cold War were definitively drawn.

In parallel with this split in Europe went a gigantic shift in population unparalleled in European history – something that was largely a consequence of the wartime decisions taken by the Allied leaders. In the immediate aftermath of the war 2 million Poles left eastern Poland after it became part of the Soviet Union – a few went voluntarily, but most did not. Meantime, a total of more than 11 million Germans were thrown out of East Prussia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other eastern European countries. At least half a million of them died in the process. In addition, the Western Allies agreed to send back to the Soviet Union any Soviet citizens they came across – whether these people wished to be repatriated or not. Two million were returned; a number of them, particularly those who had fought on the German side, went unwillingly and were persecuted by the Soviet state on their return.