Even more quixotic was the film Das Leben Geht Weiter (Life Goes On), set in a beleaguered Berlin, where in reality the life that went on was mostly underground. While meant to celebrate Berliner pluck, the movie, like Kolberg, was an example of hugely misplaced effort. Because most of the buildings on location had been destroyed, UFA built full-scale imitations of them at great expense at its Babelsberg studios. Air raids knocked out electricity and phone lines during the shooting. Eventually production was shifted further west, to Luneberg, but the film was not completed when the British arrived, and none of the footage survives.
In August 1944 Goebbels ordered the closing of Berlin’s theaters, this time for good. Even before this time, however, most Berliners were too harried by the escalating air raids to consider an evening at the theater; simple survival provided drama enough. Andreas-Friedrich recorded a night under the bombs on June 21, 1944:
There is a toppling and crashing, quaking, bursting, trembling. To us it seems as if the floor bounded a yard up in the air. There’s a hit. Another. And another. We wish we could crawl into the earth. Biting smoke stings our eyes. Did our neighbors get hit? We have no idea. All we know is that we are poor, naked, and desperately in need of help. . . . [Finally] All clear! Where the next house stood is now a heap of ruins. A woman runs screaming past us. She is wrapped in a horse blanket; terror distorts her face. She is pressing three empty clothes hangers to her breast. Gradually the street comes to life; more and more people appear out of the smoke, the ruins, the ghastly destruction. They say forty-eight bombs hit our block. The dead can’t be counted yet; they’re under rubble and stone, crushed, annihilated, beyond the reach of help.
Albert Speer, on the other hand, found an element of beauty in the raids. Observing an attack from the roof of one of his flak towers, he had to remind himself
of the cruel reality in order not to be completely entranced by the scene: the illumination of the parachute flares, which the Berliners called ‘Christmas trees,’ followed by flashes of explosions which were caught by the clouds of smoke, the innumerable probing searchlights, the excitement when a plane was caught and tried to escape the cone of light, the brief flaming torch when it was hit. No doubt about it, the apocalypse provided a magnificent spectacle.
Looking on the bright side, Speer noted that the Allied bombers were accomplishing much of the demolition work that would be necessary for the realization of Germania, the envisaged Nazi capital of the future.
Speer’s boss, Adolf Hitler, witnessed neither the “magnificence” nor the horrors of the Battle of Berlin, for he was away from the city for most of this period. In any event, he had no wish to see the effects of the bombing on German cities; this was too depressing. By late 1943, according to Speer, he was even losing interest in the architectural reconstruction of Berlin. He now preferred to dream about rebuilding his old hometown of Linz, where he expected to retire and be buried. Echoing Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler said that he did not want to be interred in Berlin. “Even after a victorious war,” wrote Speer, “[Hitler] did not want to be buried beside his field marshals in the Soldiers Hall in Berlin.”
A ruined block of houses in Neue Winterfeldstrasse, 1944
The Allies hoped through bombing Berlin and other large German cities to generate widespread popular opposition to the Nazi regime. This did not materialize, though there was certainly resentment toward the authorities for bringing home the horrors of war. As Ruth Andreas-Friedrich observed following the raid that wiped out her block, survivors were markedly cool towards the SS salvage squad that came to help clear away the ruins: “‘If it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t be any ruins,’ the faces seem to say. ‘Why do you come now, when it’s too late? Why did you get us into all this in the first place?’”
While resentment towards the regime never translated into mass opposition, a number of resistance circles did emerge in Berlin over the course of the war. We have mentioned the Jewish-Communist Herbert Baum group, which came to grief in August 1942. Other small Communist cells cropped up, taking advantage of the Nazis’ distraction by the war and the sheer size and labyrinthine complexity of the capital. Some of the activists had served jail sentences during the early years of the Third Reich, from which they emerged with added hatred for their foe. Because of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, most veteran Communists held back from active resistance until the German invasion of the Soviet Union. During the first phase of the war, the most notable example of Communist resistance in Berlin involved a youth group that distributed fliers urging workers not to produce munitions. Their leader, Heinz Kapelle, was arrested and executed in July 1941—a harbinger of the fate of virtually all active Communist resisters in the city. The exiled KPD leaders in Moscow, anxious to maintain ties in Berlin that they could exploit upon returning to the city after the expected Red Army victory, smuggled a few emissaries into the capital from Sweden. One of them managed fleeting contact with a cell run by the Berliner Robert Uhrig, but Uhrig’s group was exposed in February 1942. Moscow did not have ties to a larger resistance group led by Anton Saefkow, which fell to the Gestapo in mid-1944. On the other hand, a leftist officer in the Air Ministry, Harro Schulze-Boysen, along with an official in the Economics Ministry, Arvid Harnack, radioed important military information from Berlin to Moscow. Their spy-operation, which the Nazis called the “Red Orchestra,” was broken up in August 1942. Schulze-Boysen was executed on December 22, 1942, leaving behind a verse in his cell that read: “The final judgment is not / Ended by rope or ax / And Judgment Day will give a chance / To get the verdict changed.”
The Red Orchestra was dangerous to the Nazis because it operated from inside the government. So did most of the figures involved in the famous conspiracy to assassinate Hitler that culminated in the abortive bombing at his East Prussian headquarters on July 20, 1944. This is not the place for a detailed history of the Twentieth of July movement and the bombing attempt; suffice it here to point up the salient points, highlighting the Berlin dimension.
Although few of the main figures in the plot were native Berliners, the conspiracy was based in the capital because many of the activists were members of military units or bureaucratic agencies headquartered there. Count Glaus von Stauffenberg, the man who planted the bomb, was chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the army reserve. Like many of his colleagues, he had originally been attracted to the Nazi movement in the belief that it offered the best hope for a national reawakening. When instead it began covering Germany in shame and leading it toward catastrophic defeat, the count turned passionately against the regime, which he decided could be brought down only if Hitler were eliminated. Yet for all his dedication to the cause of ridding Germany of Nazism, Stauffenberg was ill-equipped for the job of killing Hitler. Having lost his right hand and two fingers of his left hand, along with one eye, in the war, he could not use a pistol and had to resort to the messy and notoriously unreliable method of a time-bomb (a method, incidentally, that had failed to kill Hitler in Munich in 1939).
After a couple of earlier attempts to place bombs near Hitler had not come off, Stauffenberg finally decided to carry out the operation on July 20, 1944, during a staff conference at the Führer’s “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia. Arriving at the complex by plane on the appointed day, he took his bomb package into a bathroom to set the timing, but an interruption, combined with his injuries, prevented him from fusing all his explosives. Once inside the briefing hut he placed his briefcase containing the bomb as close as he could to Hitler before leaving to take a prearranged phone call from Berlin. As luck would have it, the briefcase was kicked behind the leg of a heavy map table just before the bomb detonated. This detail, along with the hut’s open windows and flimsy walls, which dissipated the force of the blast, enabled Hitler to survive with only minor injuries.