I’m selling out, take all I’ve got—
ambitions, convictions, the works.
Why not?
Enjoy these goods,
for boy, these goods
are hot!
Wilder’s film, a story of sexual license, betrayal, and reversal of fortune, brilliantly captures the mood of postwar Berlin. A city that just a few years before had touted itself as the power center of Europe, even of the world, was now reduced to a pile of rubble, ruled over, for the first time since Napoleon, by foreign powers. Foreign rule, of course, also brought division—bisection along the main fault line in the Cold War. The erstwhile capital of Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” thus became the capital of the Cold War and the site of some of the most dangerous confrontations between the new contenders for control of the post-Hitler world.
Out of the Ruins
In the autumn of 1945, Felix Gilbert, whom we last encountered in this book watching the body of Rosa Luxemburg being fished from the Landwehr Canal, returned to Berlin as a member of the American Office of Strategic Services. Hoping to see the apartment building where he had grown up, he drove out to his old neighborhood, only to find it a giant rubble field without a single structure intact. He began climbing over the ruins in an effort to locate some sign of where his house had stood. Suddenly he looked down and saw a pattern of blue and white cobblestones on which he had played hopscotch as a child. Like a macabre version of Proust’s madeleine cookies, these dusty cobblestones called to his mind “a remote past because they had played an important role in my childhood.”
Marlene Dietrich and Jean Arthur in a scene from Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, 1948
The Berlin that Gilbert had known as a child and young student was indeed a thing of the past, reduced to a charred and stinking wreck by the years of bombing and the final brutal assault by the Soviets. It had now joined the cities and towns that were grim testimonials to the destructive power of modern warfare: Coventry, Rotterdam, Dresden, Hiroshima. When the war ended about 40 percent of the German capital was destroyed and its population reduced almost by half (though it was soon to rise again because of an influx of refugees). All the major bridges were down, the canal system was clogged with wreckage and dead bodies, the U-Bahn tunnels were flooded, water sources were polluted, and rats ran uncontrolled through the streets, feeding on the rotting carcasses of man and beast. Even the famous Berlin Zoo was a scene of carnage; a hippo named Rosa floated dead in her tank with the fin of a shell protruding from her carcass, while in the ape house a gorilla lay dead with stab wounds in his chest.
A vivid picture of the devastation can be gleaned from the accounts of survivors as they climbed out of their cellars and bunkers. One day after Berlin’s capitulation the journalist Margret Boveri bicycled across the middle of the city, noting that it offered “a scene of indescribable devastation.” Russian soldiers careened drunkenly down streets filled with shot-up tanks and burned autos; dazed refugees shuffled under their enormous burdens; women carrying water buckets lined up patiently at public taps; and escaped horses ran amok. “Haven’t [the soldiers] stolen your bike from you yet?” fellow survivors asked Boveri in disbelief. After touring the central city with two friends on May 12, 1945, another dazed survivor, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, recorded in her diary:
The final six days of fighting have destroyed more of Berlin than ten heavy air raids. Only occasionally does one spot an intact building. . . .
People with weary faces poke around in the ruins, here and there recovering some battered ‘trophy’ or charred beam. . . .
A white horse is lying dead among the rubble and ruin of the place where Bruno Walter used to perform. Its body bloated, its eyes black and petrified. Like a gruesome still life it lies spread out under the broken arcades, its stiff legs accusingly pointing in the air. Bernburger Strasse is one huge pile of rubble. . . .
Taking a round-about way, we arrive at Tiergarten Park. Or rather what’s left of it. Aghast, I look at the torn-up trees. Smashed, blasted, mutilated beyond recognition. . . . On Charlottenburger Chausee the smell of decaying bodies. On closer inspection we see it is only the skeletons of horses. People living in the neighborhood have cut the meat off the dead animals’ bones piece by piece, cooked it in their pots and devoured it greedily. Only the intestines are left to decay between bare bones. . . . Now we are passing the Brandenburg Gate. Pariser Platz is swarming with people. They are carrying furniture out of the Adlon Hotel. Gold-plated mirrors, plush armchairs and mattresses. . . . We turn into Wilhelmstrasse. Ruins and dust. Dust and ruins. Wherever a cellar has remained intact, trophy hunters are at work, struggling up and down the stairs like maggots on cheese. . . . There stands the Chancellery. A battered stone colossus. Cavernous and desolate, its windows look out on the ruins of Wilhelmsplatz. Nothing stirs behind these walls that hold the remains of Adolf Hitler. Before the entrance a Russian soldier is on guard. His gun across his knees, he leans comfortably back in a green silk-covered armchair. In the middle of the Court of Honor, so-called, an image of perfect peace. The sight of it makes us smile. Certainly this is not the sort of guard the Nazis had imagined for their Führer and Chancellor.
A Russian soldier relieves a Berlin woman of her bicycle
Russian street signs in the ruins of Berlin, 1945
Because the Western Allies did not arrive in Berlin until early July 1945, the Soviets had two months of sole control over the city—two months to pillage, plunder, and rape with impunity. Such behavior stemmed in part from pent-up hatred of the Germans, but it was also Stalin’s policy to extract as much war booty as possible from Berlin before the Western Allies arrived. Hurriedly the Russians dismantled entire factories and put the equipment on trains heading east; once in the USSR the machines often proved useless because they were incompatible with the local infrastructure. Like the Jews under Nazism, Berlin’s citizens were ordered to surrender telephones, radios, and typewriters to the authorities. The pride of Blaupunkt, Telefunken, Philips, and Siemens piled up at various collection points, open to the elements. And just to make sure that the Berliners understood who now ran their town, the Soviets put Berlin’s clocks on Russian time and renamed streets and squares after Russian heroes such as General Nikolai Berzarin, the first Soviet city commander. They also erected a memorial to their victory just west of the Brandenburg Gate (it still stands today, minus its guards). “With this memorial,” the architectural historian Brian Ladd has aptly noted, “the Soviets staked their claim to the historical landscape: within sight of the Reichstag, astride the former site of the Hohenzollerns’ statue-laden Victory Boulevard, and at the point where Speer’s north-south and east-west axes were to meet.”
For the Soviet soldiers, females of all ages remained fair game in the first weeks after the capitulation. According to one witness, fat women (of whom there cannot have been many) had the most to fear, for “primitive people revere their fat women as symbols of abundance and fertility.” Lurid accounts by contemporaries tend to convey the impression that the majority of Berlin women were assaulted and that every other Russian soldier was a rapist. Clearly this was not the case, but abuse of women was indeed widespread during the Soviet occupation, especially in the early phases. Women were violated ten, twenty, sometimes sixty times over. Often they were beaten and maimed in the process. Some who could not live with the experience committed suicide. A twelve-year-old girl who had been raped six times hanged herself on orders from her father, who had been unable to protect her. Desperate to avoid such “dishonor,” men hid their womenfolk under piles of coal or bundled them up to look like grannies.