Category: British Occupation of Germany after the Second World War

14th July 2007

Some ideas seem to have a history of their own, appearing at different times in different circumstances.

A British Foreign Office document on ‘German reactions to defeat’ dated 2nd January 1945, included the following reference to ‘super-Sweden’ as a suitable role for Germany after the war:

"Germany must be encouraged to aim at being a super-Sweden, cleaner, better planned and healthier than any State ever was before, with better social, medical and educational services and a higher standard of living than any State ever had."

Encouraging Germany to become a ‘super-Sweden’, implied that the country could become prosperous, with an excellent welfare system, perhaps even a socialist government, but would have no military capability, no diplomatic influence, and should stay well clear of any possible future conflict between a communist and totalitarian East (ie the Soviet Union and Eastern European satellite states) and an individualistic and democratic West, (ie the US, Britain and Western Europe), much as Sweden had remained neutral throughout World War Two.

Last week I attended a conference on Britain and Europe in the 20th Century, and was surprised to hear a similar reference to ‘greater Sweden’, in a paper given by Helen Carr from the University of Keele, on events which took place more than twenty years later: Britain’s second application to join the European Community in 1967.

Helen Carr described how a senior official in the British Foreign Office had written a paper outlining three foreign policy options for Britain: subservience to the United States, joining the European Community, and ‘go it alone’ which was also described as the ‘Greater Sweden’ option.

The same role, of becoming a ‘super-Sweden’, which the British Foreign Office had considered right for Germany after the war, was now dismissed as undesirable for Britain in 1967, as it meant giving up a world role and the ability to influence the affairs of other countries. This was unthinkable at a time when officials in the Foreign Office and British Governments in general, both Labour and Conservative, still thought of Britain, which had only recently lost its empire, as a great power in the world.

At first I thought these two references to ‘super-Sweden’ and ‘greater Sweden’ were pure coincidence, but it then turned out that both Foreign Office papers, in 1945 and 1967, were written by the same person, Sir Con O’Neill, who was to become head of the German section of the Foreign Office and then, twenty years later, played a leading role in the British applications to join the European Community.

Does this tell us anything about British foreign policy and the mindset of Foreign Office officials? I am no expert on the British applications to join the European Community, but the 1945 paper on ‘German reactions to defeat’ is reprinted in full in a book which I have read, published in 1997: ‘Conditions of Surrender: Britains and Germans witness the end of the war’ edited by Ulrike Jordan. The paper is also discussed in an article in the book by the German historian Lothar Kettenacker, titled  ‘British Post-war Planning for Germany: Haunted by the Past.’

It is clear from reading the full paper, that Con O’Neill was already equating National Socialism in Germany with Communism in the Soviet Union, at a time when the war was not yet over, when Russia was an ally of Britain and the US, without whose support winning the war against Nazi Germany would have been far more difficult, if not impossible. His concern was that there would be a revival of German militarism, and that Germans were somehow naturally inclined, by national character and instinct, to become allied with the communist East, rather than the democratic West.

This seems strange in many ways, as for the previous three years Goebbels had been loudly publicising the view that the British and Americans should cooperate with the Germans in mutual defence against ‘Bolshevism’. The same line was taken by the short lived German interim government of Admiral Dönitz. In a speech on 1st May 1945, after saying that "The Führer has appointed me as his successor" Dönitz continues: "It is my first task to save the German people from destruction by the advancing Bolshevik enemy. For this aim alone the military struggle continues." On 2nd May the foreign secretary in the Dönitz government, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, expressed the same views in a speech on Germany as a ‘Bulwark against Bolshevism’. This included one of the first references to an ‘iron curtain’. "In the east, the iron curtain is advancing even further, behind which the work of annihilation proceeds hidden from the eyes of the world."

As Lothar Kettenacker said in his article in the book: "Apparently it did not occur to British officials that the Germans were not at all inclined to trust the Russians, whose land they had devastated, or the Bolsheviks, against whom Goebbels had railed for the last three years."

Here is an extract from the 1945 paper by Con O’Neill. It shows how common it was for British diplomats and Foreign Office officials to think in terms of national stereotypes, their anthropomorphic tendency to attribute personal characteristics to countries, and how the actions of the government of a country were explained in terms of the supposed instincts and beliefs of the people as a whole.

"National Socialism had been no more than a special form of organization of the instincts and capacities of the German people. Other forms of totalitarian organisation almost equally unpleasant and effective may occur, for those instincts and capacities will remain largely what they are….

Germany must be encouraged to aim at being a super-Sweden, cleaner, better planned and healthier than any State ever was before, with better social, medical and educational services and a higher standard of living than any State ever had."

With hindsight we know that nothing came of the ‘super-Sweden’ idea. Germany was divided into the Bundesrepublik in the West, closely allied with Britain and the US in NATO, and the DDR in the East, closely allied with the Soviet Union. It is therefore all the more intriguing to find the same idea cropping up twenty years later, in another paper written by the same person, but this time as an undesirable option for Britain, instead of a desirable role for Germany.

As a postscript, I attended a lecture a year ago given by Timothy Garton Ash, who said that the same idea, this time described as ‘offshore Switzerland’ rather than ‘super-Sweden’, was now seen as a highly attractive option for Britain, among some of those on the right of British politics who were advocating leaving the European Union. Sweden itself, of course, is still prosperous, but joined the EU in 1995.

24th June 2007

Last week I wrote about the Level of Industry Negotiations, which took place in Berlin from September 1945 until the end of March 1946, as described in the book ‘Berlin Reparations Assignment‘, written by two members of the US delegation, B U Ratchford and Wm D Ross.

Sir Alec Cairncross was the economic adviser to the British delegation. He later became a distinguished economist, economic historian and Chancellor of Glasgow University. His book ‘The Price of War’ published in 1986, is a history of the negotiations from the British perspective. A second book ‘A Country to Play With’ published a year later in 1987, is a more personal account of his own role.

Cairncross’s description of the absurd nature of the negotiations, and how the agreement was discarded almost as soon as it was reached, is very similar to that of Ratchford and Ross. On being asked to take on the job, he says: "It seemed to me as plain as a pikestaff after a three week’s visit to Germany in July 1945 that any sensible man, asked what industrial plant was surplus to the requirements of a peaceful Germany was bound to give the short answer: ‘None’."

He describes his frustration as his expert economic advice was discarded by the political negotiators, and the agreement finally reached, on Steel production levels in particular, ignored all his carefully gathered statistical evidence. On the plan as a whole he comes to the conclusion: "that the Plan itself was utterly unrealistic seems obvious enough in retrospect." The finally agreed levels of industry were "neither consistent nor coherent…. They were the outcome of a bargaining process in which each decision was unrelated to the others and the resulting jumble could not be assumed to make any sense whatever. Nobody could say what the German standard of living would work out at, or whether Germany would achieve a level of exports sufficient to pay for the imports required at that level, or how many Germans would be unemployed. There was no real agreement even on the size of the German population. There was open disagreement whether reparations could be taken from the so-called peaceful industries. And, of course, no one knew how much industrial capacity remained in Germany, least of all in the Soviet zone."

As with Berlin Reparations Assignment, the author’s personal comments are as, if not more, interesting, than the account of the negotiations. Here are some examples :

It seems remarkable that, despite spending 5 months in Berlin, Cairncross met hardly any Germans: "Contact with the Germans was limited … We knew very little of what was going on inside the minds of the Germans we passed in the street."

For the British and Allied delegations, life was a round of endless parties and opulent living in the officers’ mess where: "As soon as you came into the sitting room, a German Jeeves shimmered in to offer alcoholic nectar and when you returned from the intake of calories in the adjoining dining room he shimmered back again with coffee and brandy. The food was abundant and prepared by a first class chef."

One reason for going was not to see Germany after the war, but because he wanted to meet the Russians at first hand: "People did not talk at that time about an iron curtain. But they were conscious of the segregated world in which the Russians lived and of the clash that had begun to be felt between that world and ours … Russian propaganda in the summer of 1945 had taken a stridently anti-British note while in Britain there was general mistrust of Russia."

"[The British] had found to their consternation, and to the amusement of the Germans, that the balance of power in Europe had been only too successfully overthrown; it promised to be as difficult to make peace with their Russian allies as to defeat their German enemies … To make a slum of Germany, moreover, would be to make her an easy prey to communism and turn the scale against democracy throughout the whole of Western Europe. This would have been the last word in folly: to have cast Germany with open eyes to a totalitarian regime in reparation for a war fought to overthrow another form of totalitarianism."

But despite this Cold War view of the Soviet Union and many other unfavourable comments on the Russians in the books, Cairncross speaks of being on good terms with his opposite numbers in the delegation and how, when he left Berlin shortly before the end of the negotiations: "The Russian team gave me a party when I left Berlin and loaded me with presents of vodka and caviare."

On the contentious issue of whether the Allied negotiators were influenced by commercial considerations; a desire to hold back the recovery of German industry after the war, to make it easier for companies in their own countries to compete in international markets; Cairncross states clearly in ‘The Price of War’ that: "There is no evidence that commercial considerations exercised a decisive influence on British reparations policy in 1945." The overriding factor for the British was a desire to do all they could to prevent future military aggression by Germany.

On the other hand, in ‘A Country to Play With’ he claims that the French and US delegations were influenced by industrialists, out for what they could get:

On the negotiations on steel he refers to: "The presence in Berlin of a number of American steel men … who hoped to boast on their return to the USA that they had settled the future of the German steel industry," and on French proposals to forbid the export by Germany of pharmaceutical products and potash he comments: "In the British view, none of these differences had much to do with security: all of them reflected French commercial interests."

And the British delegation too, not surprisingly, were not immune to commercial pressures: "Even at this late stage departments in Whitehall were still pressing for more severe limitations on German industry. The Ministry of Supply and Aircraft Production was asking for a prohibition of the manufacture of watches and most other precision instruments, partly no doubt in the interests of the newly established British watch and clock industry, partly because of the importance in the Second World War of capacity to make fuses and precision instruments. The dyestuffs industry was said to be basing its plans on the complete elimination of the Germany industry…"

19th June 2007

Ratchford and Ross were two economic advisors to the US delegation at the Level of Industry negotiations, which took place in Berlin from September 1945 until the end of March 1946, following on from the Potsdam Agreement between the Allies at the end of the war.

Their book, ‘Berlin Reparations Assignment’, published in 1947, is a critical and highly readable account of the negotiations, written soon after the events described:

"…Ratchford was in Berlin from August 1945, until February, 1946. During most of that time he was Economic Advisor for Level of Industry in the Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.)." He was section chief of a small group that prepared economic data and he also served as economics advisor to the head of the industry branch and to Colonel Draper, the Director of the US Economics Division. Ross was an economist in Ratchford’s office.

The purpose of the negotiations was for the victorious allied powers, Britain, the US, France and the Soviet Union, to agree the level of reparations to be paid by a defeated Germany, and the level of industry which would be permitted in Germany after the war. The two issues were linked. The lower the level of industry permitted, the higher the level of surplus industrial plant and equipment that could be shipped off to the Allies as reparations. At least, that was the theory. In practice it never worked out like that.

The negotiations must have been some of the most fruitless ever conducted. Here is an example from the discussions on footwear. As usual, the Western Allies; the US, Britain and Germany, disagreed with the Soviet Union, in this case on whether the Germans after the war would be permitted 1.9 pairs or 1.2 pairs of shoes per person per year:

"Footwear. In a divided recommendation of the Technical Staff, the American, British and French delegates favored a total annual per capita consumption of 1.9 pairs of shoes per year, of which 0.9 would be of leather. The Soviet delegate favored a total of 1.2 pairs, of which 0.5 would be of leather. Compromises were offered at 1.7 and 1.4 respectively for the totals. The Committee was not able to reach an agreement and the matter was referred to the Directorate of Economics."

There were similar disagreements on just about all industrial goods and commodities.  In the event, the agreement reached in March 1946 was soon discarded and never implemented. As Ratchford and Ross say at the end of their book, writing in 1947:

"The final agreement had been reached only after the hardest kind of negotiating. In order to reach any agreement at all, some of the most difficult problems had been evaded entirely and others had been dealt with in vague, general terms which were capable of varying interpretations…. the operation of the Plan was suspended only a short time after it had been agreed upon. It is doubtful that it will ever by put into operation again, or, if it is, only after substantial changes."

As, if not more interesting than the account of the negotiations, are the descriptions in the book, of Berlin after the war and the attitudes of the US soldiers and administrators. You may wish to compare these with other contemporary accounts of Germany and Berlin after the war which I’ve quoted in this blog, such as the books ‘Berlin Twilight‘ and ‘The Bonfire of Berlin‘ and the films ‘Germany Year Zero‘ and ‘A Defeated People‘. Here are some extracts from ‘Berlin Reparations Assignment’:

"The physical setting in which an international agreement is negotiated is usually of little significance. In this case, however, the weird physical setting and the fantastic economic, political, and social conditions which went with it were so strange and unique that they had a pronounced effect on the personnel and operations of the military government organization within which the reparations plan had to be formulated. Those conditions created an atmosphere so unreal, so nightmarish, so demoralizing that efficient work was almost impossible."

"In 1945 [Berlin] was a fantastic heap of ruins – the prostrate capital of a prostrate nation. One must see the devastation to comprehend it. The traveller who arrived in Berlin by air, only forty-eight hours from undamaged America, was confronted by a sight he is not likely to forget. As his plane circled for a landing at Tempelhof Airfield – almost in the center of the city – the spectacle below hit him almost like a physical blow."

"Great as was the material devastation in Berlin, the human devastation was probably equal to it. The years of war and bombing, the Russian siege and occupation, the separation of families, the high casualty rate in the armed forces, and, in the last year, the uncertainty as to the fate of any who had not been reported killed, the shortages, the lack of jobs, the terrible physical devastation – all of these things had combined to produce a dazed, hungry, scared, bewildered population."

On the other hand:

"The American billets, after light repairs had been made, were usually comfortable and often luxurious…. Two or three servants cared for each house…"

Whilst some US troops and military government staff were conscientious and hard-working: "able, serious-minded men and women who worked hard at their jobs…there were also some who were definite liabilities. They did little themselves and contributed much to the demoralization of the group."

Four types of US soldiers and administrators were identified and described. One group had been sent to Berlin against their will and wanted to get home as quickly as possible. In the meantime they tried to do as little as possible and get as much out of it as they could.

Another group, mainly officers, wanted to get to Berlin, enjoy the experience and take a fling at the black market: "He considered the assignment a vacation and proceeded to celebrate the whole time."

There were also civilian counterparts to these vacationing soldiers: "who just wanted to see Berlin, enjoy the thrill of being part of an occupying force, and experience life in an environment where social customers and restrictions did not bind."

"Finally there were the civilians who were little more than modern carpet baggers… Usually these men knew Germany well… Their chief concern in Berlin was in establishing black market connections and in arranging various trips to various parts of Germany and near-by countries."

For those engaged in black market operations… "drink was in effect free. Drinks were paid for in occupation marks which … were so plentiful that they were hardly considered as money. For example, the price of one pack of American cigarettes in the black market would buy fifty double scotches at the bar."

"Again it should be emphasised that there were plenty of able, conscientious, hard-working people in military government. But the four types described above constituted a sizeable group which did much to break down the morale of the organization."

9th June 2007

George Clare was born in Vienna in 1920 as Georg Klaar, of Austrian Jewish parents.

He escaped to London shortly before the war started, in November 1938. His father went to Paris, as he had been offered a job working for a French bank, but both his father and mother were later killed, trying to escape from France under Nazi occupation.

Berlin Days, published in 1989, describes his time working for British Military Government and the Control Commission in Berlin in 1946-7, firstly as an interpreter, and later, after being naturalised as a British citizen, as an officer, for a group responsible for de-nazification in culture and the media.

After the war he worked for Axel Springer, the German publisher, and became Chief Representative of the organisation in the UK.

The book is not as vivid as some other accounts of Berlin written soon after the events described, such as Berlin Twilight, (see earlier postings), but is still interesting as another personal memoir from a contemporary witness. Here are a few extracts:

Speaking at the start of the book about his parents’ Austrian bourgeois background:

"My parents and their circle’s spiritual and intellectual home was not Judaism but the world of the great thinkers and writers of the German tongue. Indeed, Jews of our kind were not merely passive devotees but active protagonists of Austro-German culture. My father worshipped, never at a synagogue, but almost daily at the altar of German literature. By profession and with his brain he was a banker, but his heart belonged to the German classics, most of all their poetry. His daytime reading was the balance sheet, but in the evening he refreshed himself with Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Eichendorff, Rilke. He knew many of their poems by heart and, when reciting, occasionally slipped in one of his own, some genuinely moving, particularly those he wrote as a young Austrian Army officer during the Great War. This live for German culture was paired with respect, not much short of admiration, for Germany and her achievements. In those days many Austrians, including Jewish ones, did not see in the Germany of the liberal Weimar Republic our country’s ‘big’ but its ‘great’ brother."

On his own first impressions of Berlin in January 1946:

"My most striking first impression was not visual but aural: the muted echoes of a battered city. The 1938 Berlin had assaulted one’s ears with lively and strident crescendos, harsh atonal, high-decibel; a medley of blaring car horns, squeaking brakes, snorting buses, clanging trams, shouting newspaper sellers. But now – like slow eerie drum beats of a danse macabre – each sound rose and remained alone, the clip-clop of often wooden-soled footsteps, the rattle of a handcart or an occasional tram, the chugging of a wood-fuelled bus, the gear-clash of an allied army lorry. This absence of the constant roar of city life was more unsettling than the sight of bombed and shelled buildings, of jagged outlines of broken masonry framing bits of blue sky. I had been prepared for that, but not for a city hushed to a whisper. Yet Berlin was not a lifeless moon-scape. It lived – albeit in something of a zombied trance – mirrored in the dazed looks of many of the people I passed, more often noticeable in men than women. But then the men were mostly old or elderly, bowed and bitter-faced; the few youngish ones who were about – emaciated shadows of the soldiers who had almost conquered an entire continent – looked pathetic and downtrodden in the tattered remnants of their Wehrmacht uniforms. The women were of all ages and, with so many men killed and hundreds of thousands in prisoner-of-war camps, they, not as formerly the Prussian male, dominated the scene."

On the cultural revival of Germany after the war, and his perception of Berlin as a ‘cultural bridge’ between Germany and the western allies:

"One might have expected a spiritual vacuum to follow the collapse of the Third Reich and of the ideologies which had spawned it, but this did not happen. The other Germany, though buried under the pressures of the totalitarian regime, had not fossilised. Freed from the dead-weight of the past, it surfaced again in 1945, slowly at first, but then, with the support of the western allies, at ever-increasing pace. That was the true post-was ‘German miracle’ and it first came to pass in the Berlin of the Golden Hunger Years. In Berlin, still Germany’s capital, still its intellectual and artistic centre the links between the German and the western mind were reforged. Berlin was not only the city of the Luftbrücke, the airlift, but also the Kulturbrücke, the ‘cultural bridge’ between German and the west, the crucial place at a crucial time."

2nd June 2007

Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick was head of chancery at the British embassy in Berlin before the Second World War, head of the German Section at the Foreign Office from 1947 to 1949 and High Commissioner in Germany from 1950 to 1953, before following in the footsteps of Sir William Strang, to become Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1953-7.

‘The Inner Circle’, published in 1959, is the title of his autobiography. Originally I thought the title implied a group of people – senior politicians, diplomats, administrators and army officers – who effectively governed the country. In fact it means nothing of the kind. As the introduction to the book explains, the ‘Inner Circle’ is a reference to the London Underground railway, and refers to a Foreign Office saying that "once a man was launched on the Inner Circle (London, Paris, Berlin, Rome) it was impossible to leave the track." This shows how, despite the Empire, British diplomats between the wars still saw Europe as the centre of the world. Ivone Kirkpatrick worked in London, Rome and Berlin, though not in Paris.

He was born in India in 1897 and spent the first 7 years of his life there. His family were catholic Irish from Limerick, and he was related to Lord Hardinge, who was his cousin and Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office in 1918. He joined the army in the First World War and was wounded in Gallipoli. He then joined the Foreign Office and after postings in Brazil and Rome, joined the British embassy in Berlin in September 1933. He attended many of the meetings between Chamberlain and Hitler, which took place before the war, including Munich, as a British observer and record taker.

In 1944 he worked for the embryonic Control Commission for Germany and Austria, where he "was responsible for the constitution and preparation of the British element in Austria" (At the time Major General Kirby was his counterpart for Germany).

In an interesting aside, he says that he declined to accompany the Control Commission to Germany in 1945 (for reasons that are not explained) and "Sir William Strang was appointed to take my place." Strang’s post was political advisor to the Military Governor, Field Marshal Montgomery. Other sources suggest that Kirkpatrick was himself considered for the top post, before a decision was taken to appoint Montgomery, a soldier rather than a diplomat, as Military Governor of the British Zone.

Instead, Kirkpatrick was appointed as the British political advisor to General Eisenhower at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) in Frankfurt for a brief period, until SHAEF was dissolved in July 1945.

It is interesting to see how themes I’ve seen in other memoirs and contemporary accounts re-occur. Here are some examples:

Firstly, another case of someone who was influenced by early experiences in Germany. Yvone Kirkpatrick relates how, in 1910 as a thirteen year old boy, he spent the summer holidays with his mother in the Black Forest in Germany. For Sunday lunch: "the meal was adorned by a Sunday menu which depicted German troops advancing to the attack on a French position, whilst Zeppelins hovering in the air showered bombs on the defeated enemy. The unpleasant impression produced by this weekly manifestation was reinforced by the remarks which the German children staying in the hotel let fall from time to time. They told us with the frank malice of the young that England was decadent and that Germany would be obliged within a short time to strip us of our overseas possessions."

Secondly, Kirkpatrick’s first impressions of Germany after the war, which show the same combination revealed in other contemporary accounts, of astonishment at the scale of destruction, and the idyllic, even luxurious, existence for many of the occupying forces:

"I flew to British headquarters at Bad Oeynhausen with Strang. There we parted, he to go to Berlin and I to Frankfurt. Germany was then an astonishing sight. Everything which modern man considers necessary to the maintenance of life in a civilised society had disappeared. There was no governmental authority, no police. No trains, trams or cars; no factories working, no postal service, no telephones, no newspapers, no banks. No shop was open and it would have been impossible to buy a loaf of bread, a glass of beer or an aspirin. Every bridge was blown and the available rolling-stock could be seen marooned between the ruins. In the Rhine hundreds of sunken craft shown their upper works whilst the giant bridges lay collapsed in the river-bed. In the countryside the sudden departure of the foreign labourers had halted agricultural work. I saw one aged women trying to cut an enormous cornfield with a hand sickle. The only sign of life was provided by hundreds of thousands of Germans on foot trekking in all directions. It was as if a giant ant-heap had suddenly been disturbed. Motoring from Bad Oeynhausen to Frankfurt, I stopped at the side of the autobahn to lunch with my driver off a K-ration. As we were sitting in the shade, I beheld the approach of a sad little procession, A middle-aged man was pushing a perambulator laden with suitcases and household effects. Behind him limped a footsore woman and two children. I walked down the road and asked him who he was and where he was going. He told me that he was a bank manager at Paderborn and that he had taken refuge near the Chiemsee on the Austrian border. He had, however, heard that although his bank had been destroyed, the cellar was habitable. So he was walking back from the Chiemsee to Paderborn. At the point at which I met him he had completed three-quarters of his 500-mile walk. It was fortunate that this great migration was blessed by abnormally fine weather.

At Frankfurt I lodged with Air Marshal Tedder in a charming villa in the Taunus mountains overlooking the city. After the turmoil of war it was an idyllic existence. In the morning I drove down to the giant I.G. Farben building which had been fitted out as General Eisenhower’s headquarters. We all lunched in the Mess at Frankfurt and in the evening returned to the fresh, almost Alpine air of our mountain retreat. There was very little social life, which was a blessing, but a number of interesting people came to stay. Amongst these was Prince Bernadotte, who gave me an account of Himmler’s efforts during the closing months of the war to use him as an intermediary for the conclusion of a separate peace with the Western Allies."

Thirdly and lastly, an interesting comment on the impact of the Korean War in 1950:

"The impact of this event on Germany was tremendous. It was felt that the Korean war was only a curtain raiser to a Russian-sponsored war of unification in Germany. There was a wave of panic and many sought to re-insure with the Russians. Some Ruhr industrialists, for example, began to place advertisements in the Communist newspapers. In North-Rhine-Westphalia, the Minister of the Interior removed the numbers from police uniforms because experience showed that policemen were unwilling to act against Communists for fear of identification.

It is difficult now to recapture the atmosphere of those days. Only 4 weak Anglo-American divisions and practically no air force stood between the Channel ports and the 22 Soviet divisions poised a few miles from our zonal boundary. I can remember an experienced American correspondent telling me that he was convinced that it was only a matter of weeks or even days before the Russians struck. In Berlin and in frontier towns like Hamburg the attitude of the public was robust, but elsewhere foodstuffs were hoarded and preparations made for flight. Any unusual noise was thought to be the sound of approaching Russian artillery fire."

29th May 2007

Last week I wrote about the film ‘Germany Year Zero’ made in 1947 by the Italian neo-realist film director, Roberto Rossellini, and asked if life for a young child in Berlin, at the end of the war, was really as bad as shown in the film?

Helga Schneider was born in November 1937. She was deserted by her mother (who joined the SS and became a concentration camp guard) in 1941 and was brought up by her father and stepmother. In "The Bonfire of Berlin" she tells the story of her lost childhood. Her stepmother couldn’t cope with her and she was sent, firstly to a mental institution, which she hated but survived, and then to a boarding school, which she loved. At the end of 1944, when she was still only 7 years old, she returned to Berlin and spent the closing months of the war with her stepmother’s family. Most of the time was spent sheltering from the bombs in the cellar of the apartment block where they lived.

The subject of my studies is the British Occupation of Germany after the war, and the British make only a very brief appearance in this book. But how can an historian understand one set of sources, such as the official papers of the British Military Government and Control Commission, the memoirs of British officials, or the British Zone Review, without also reading memoirs and contemporary accounts written by those on the other side? For example, if you read my earlier posting on the debate in the British Zone Review on ‘Feeing Sorry for the Germans‘, read it again, after you’ve read this posting.

In keeping with the approach in this blog of letting sources ‘speak for themselves’ here are a few extracts from Helga Schneider’s book:

Firstly, on being caught by a bombing raid just outside the door of their house, in the Autumn of 1944, when her Aunt Hilde was bringing her back to Berlin from her boarding school:

"We had almost reached the door of the house when a woman ran towards us shouting, ‘Get away from here. Run to the shelter. They’re coming!’

I looked up and saw a triangle of low-flying planes followed by other triangles; at the same time a chorus of wailing sirens went up. My heart leapt into my throat: the sirens had sounded too late, the planes had already begun firing, and all hell broke loose. I was short of breath and thought I would collapse. Then a powerful blast of air hurled me against the door. Feeling as though I was falling into a deep ravine, I lost consciousness.

When I came to, I found myself lying on the ground with a loud roaring in my ears. Everything around me seemed to be flying through the air, fragments of brick, bits of tarmac, pieces of wood… I saw Hilde lying at the door, arms slack, eyes closed, with a trickle of blood running slowly from her hairline to the corner of her mouth. She looked as if she was dead. The roaring was still all around us, and as I burst into terrified tears, a lashing rain of rubble crashed down on me like a hurricane. My mouth and nostrils filled with dust and sand, and I felt I was suffocating. I spat earth, blood and bits of brick…. I reached Hilde and stared at her in astonishment, touching her chin gently. Suddenly she opened her eyes and gazed at me vacantly, murmuring, ‘What happened?’ Then her face sprang to life: ‘Oh my God, are you injured?’

‘I don’t know …’ I looked at my hands, my arms. There was blood. I was horrified. I choked back my nausea. Suddenly Hilde whispered, ‘Please don’t turn round…’ But I turned round straight away and saw her. The woman who had shouted ‘Run to the shelter!’ She was lying not far from us in a pool of blood, headless. I vomited. I vomited my guts up. I vomited up all the horror at the world."

Unlike the headless woman, both Helga and her Aunt Hilde were only slightly injured.

Secondly on the effects of hunger:

"We lived like moles in the cellar, numb and drained by inactivity. We waited. Our minds grew dull. Sometimes we behaved like animals.

One day Egon [another boy in the cellar] was gnawing on a miserable stump of bread his mother had given him. He was sitting on a stool, holding the bread in both hands, and the grinding of his teeth became so insistent that I became absurdly annoyed, Then a strange thing happened. My brother, who had been curled up in a corner with Teddy, worryingly downcast and apathetic as usual, suddenly leapt to his feet and jumped on Egon to take the bread from him. Something bestial was unleashed within me. Rather than separate the two of them, I joined the fray. It was as though my mind had blocked out everything apart from the absolute need to get hold of that piece of bread. As though hypnotised, I laid into those two little boys and, when I finally pulled the bread from Egon’s fist, dashed upstairs as though the Devil was after me. I reached the first landing and stopped panting…. Crouching in a low, gaping window, I devoured the bread, gnawing at it like a ravenous rodent. After swallowing the last crumb, I felt as though I was waking from a horrible dream. Only then did I realise what I had done. I was so upset that I started crying, not with remorse but with profound anxiety. Hunger had turned me into an animal!"

Thirdly, on what happened on two occasions when the victorious Russian soldiers discovered the group hiding in their cellar. The first time a soldier asked her if she was hungry. When she answered yes: "The Russian said something to one of the other men, who slipped a loaf of black bread out of a knapsack and handed it to me." After they left, the loaf was cut into slices and shared between everyone in the cellar. "We consumed our slices slowly, relishing every last crumb. I thought I had never eaten anything so exquisite."

A few days later, two drunken Russian solders found their way into the cellar and raped two of the girls there, in full sight of everyone. One of the girls, Erika, was ill with tuberculosis. "It had never until that moment occurred to me that a man might take the slightest interest in such a shadow of a girl. Erika stared at the Russian and turned white as a sheet. She started trembling, and her coughs mingled with her tears … I tried to take my eyes off the horrible spectacle but I couldn’t. What I saw was unimaginable, cruel, unjust …"

Erika never recovered. "It was as though her body, shattered by the horrible abuse to which she had been subjected, had succumbed to her illness, Struggling against a terrible breathlessness, lips bloodless and eyes vacant, she coughed and spat blood into a tin bowl someone had brought to her."

The following day, concerned that she was losing blood, Erika’s mother found a doctor who examined her as they all gathered round her bed: "Eventually Erika looked up at us one by one, smiled weakly and murmured, ‘Thank you.’ Then her lips tensed, her eyelids grew heavy, a long shudder ran through her body, and a drop of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth, like a tiny rosebud. She gripped her mother’s hand and kissed it. But the kiss stiffened, and she died biting her mother’s fingers."

A few days later, they heard the news on the radio that Berlin had surrendered and the war was over: "There was an explosion of jubilation, tears of disbelief flowed down our faces, Euphoria, kisses, tears…. All of a sudden everything was erased: quarrels, insults, meanness and intolerance, malice and vulgar jokes, sullenness, a lack of solidarity, of sensitivity, of humanity. The cellar could not contain our happiness and we rushed into the street…. Surrender had turned us into human beings again, sanctioning the first of our rights, the right to hope. We weren’t just survivors, we were new people…."

"But what was Berlin like now? It was an expanse of burning ruins whose glow turned night to day. A limitless bonfire with a residue of humanity enduring the most catastrophic conditions in its belly. The streets were packed with corpses that stank to the heavens; the water shortage had turned the city into an open-air latrine. For a long time there had been no electricity, or gas, or water, or heating, or any distribution of food or medicine; the sewers were paralysed. Infectious diseases raged, so lice, bugs and rats reigned supreme….

"The cellar was hastily cleared, and the mattresses were carried back up into the block. The suitcases returned to the flats, this time forever… I gazed around the empty space where we had lived crammed on top of one another, piled up like beasts, intruding on our neighbours with our smells, our bad tempers, our selfishness. We had passed beyond what was endurable, what was imaginable; we had passed beyond our strength, beyond humanity. Yet we were to learn that our suffering was nothing compared with what had happened to the Jews in the concentration camps."

Helga Schneider was fortunate. Her father survived the war and the family left Berlin in Spring 1947 to go, first to a refugee camp in Lubeck and then to Austria. In 1963 she moved to live in Italy.

In 1971 she found her mother again and went to visit her with her son, Renzo, but her mother showed no remorse for abandoning her daughter, nor for her Nazi past:

"My blood froze. If she, in 1941, had decided that she didn’t want her daughter, it was my turn not to want my mother! My son and I took the first train back to Italy. Renzo wept with disappointment. How could I explain why I hadn’t found a mother, and he hadn’t found a grandmother? He was only five years old…. So I lost my mother for the second time."

She never saw her mother again until 1998, when she received a call from her retirement home, asking her to come and visit. Her book ‘Let me Go – My Mother and the SS‘ is a record of that meeting.