For Truman, who had never been to Germany before, flying to the meeting over the wrecked cities of the Reich in his presidential plane, The Sacred Cow, was a sobering experience, and driving through Berlin was even more so. As he recorded later, drawing on his extensive historical reading: “I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking . . . of Scipio, Ramses II, Sherman, Jenghis Khan.” Truman’s headquarters at the conference, an imposing villa in Babelsberg, had a horrible recent history of which the president was not then aware. It had belonged to a noted publisher, Gustav Müller-Grote, who two months earlier had been forced to watch Russian soldiers gang-rape his daughters in his living room. The soldiers had then looted and destroyed everything in the house. When they decided to make the place available to Truman for his “Little White House,” the Soviets expelled Müller-Grote and his family and brought in new furniture that they had confiscated from other villas. Truman learned of all this later through a letter from one of Müller-Grote’s sons. Had he known it at the time, one wonders if he would have “seen no reason,” as he said upon his departure for Potsdam, “why we should not welcome [the Soviets’] friendship and give ours to them.”
Clement Attlee, Harry Truman, and Josef Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, August 1945
The plenum meetings at the Potsdam Conference took place in a mock-Tudor palace called Cecilienhof, which had been built between 1911 and 1916 for Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and his wife, Cecilia. Its front garden now featured a giant star of red geraniums—a none-too-subtle symbol of the Soviets’ proprietary attitude. The long-winded discussions in that gloomy building could hardly have discouraged the Russians in their ambitions for Germany and Berlin. The Potsdam Agreement essentially confirmed the earlier accords, which placed east-central Europe in the Soviet sphere of interest. Poland, still occupied by the Red Army, was given a new western border on the Oder/Western Neisse Rivers, which put Moscow in effective control of the coal-rich Silesian region, whose former German residents, expelled by the Poles, joined the vast stream of refugees flowing west. While postulating “uniformity of treatment of the German population throughout Germany,” the agreement allowed the occupation powers to extract reparations from their zones according to their individual needs. In exchange for shipping food and raw materials to western Germany, Russia was promised 65 percent of the industrial goods in the western zones and another 10 percent free of charge. In accepting these arrangements the Western negotiators unwittingly set the stage for the long-term division of Europe and Germany.
Cecilienhof, site of the Potsdam Conference, 1945
France was not invited to the Potsdam Conference—a reflection, Paris believed, of the Big Three’s failure to appreciate the importance of its contribution to the German defeat. But in fact the Anglo-Americans had already decided at Yalta to grant France a role in the postwar administration of Germany, and zones of occupation in western Germany and Berlin had been set aside for her. The British and Americans later had occasion to regret their generosity, for France turned out to be almost as hard to work with as Russia, saying an obstructive non to every effort to govern Germany as one unit.
A Berlin woman returning to the city after a successful scavenging trip to the countryside
Assessing the difficulties of the Allied administration of Germany, one British military government officer observed: “The world has never known before a situation in which four peoples lived and tried to cooperate in a country inhabited by a fifth.” The challenge was even greater in the relatively confined space of a single city—and a wrecked city at that. The interallied agency established to oversee the administration of Berlin was the Kommandatura, which was composed of the four Stadtkommandanten, or city commanders. At its very first meeting on July 11, 1945, the Soviet representative announced that the Russian zone would not be able to send any food to the western sectors. This move was especially pernicious given the existence of widespread hunger and Berlin’s dependence on supplies from its agricultural hinterlands. In desperation, Berliners bartered precious household goods for comestibles. It was rumored that some farmers now covered the floors of their cow sheds with Persian carpets. However, as in the First World War, city folk often stole what they wanted, thereby rekindling old hostilities between capital and countryside.
Berlin’s situation was all the more desperate because of a massive influx of refugees from the ethnically cleansed regions of Poland and the Baltic states. There were almost 5 million displaced people on the roads in east-central Europe, and for many of them Berlin was the first port of call on the trek west. By the time they got there they were true wretches of the earth, filthy, sickly, emaciated, and, in the case of the women, often suffering the effects of multiple rapes. In an effort to prevent them from putting unbearable pressure on the strained resources of the city, the occupation powers banned them from entering Berlin. Thousands managed to get in anyway. If caught, they were immediately escorted to railway stations and ordered to take the first train out. One of the most haunting images from that era is of refugees huddled in bombed-out depots waiting for transport. Margaret Bourke-White, a Life magazine photographer, captured such scenes at the Anhalter Bahnhof. One of her photos shows a train pulling out with emaciated creatures filling every space and even clinging to the sides and top. Her coolly distant commentary reads, in part: “The long train was rushing past now, and the people clinging to the top and sides lost their identity as human beings and began to resemble barnacles. As the train gathered speed it might have been a chain of old boat hulls, whipping into the distance. I turned back to the station platforms and found them as thickly studded with humanity as they had been before the train had carried anyone away.” It is easy to see a symbolic symmetry between these overloaded trains and the boxcars that carried Jews out of Berlin in the previous half-decade. But of course, as miserable as these refugees were, most who had made it this far (thousands had died in the initial expulsions) were destined to survive. For them, Berlin was not a gateway to death but a way station on the road to a new, if often difficult, existence.
In an effort to improve conditions for the remaining population in the ruined capital, the Western Allies joined the Russians in rationing food and regulating the sale of necessities like fuel and clothing. Inevitably, this generated a black market—indeed, several black markets scattered across the city. Because just about everything was scarce in Berlin except misery, the markets embraced a vast range of items, from bread and potatoes to caviar, drugs, and fake identity papers. To trade in the markets Berliners used barter, and occasionally their bodies. The main “currency,” however, was cigarettes, especially American cigarettes. During a visit to Berlin in November 1945, Hans Speier noticed that a pack of cigarettes was worth one hundred marks (then the equivalent of about ten dollars), with Pall Malls fetching a bit more because they were longer. A nostalgic collection of five photographs of Berlin sights before their destruction was selling for ten cigarettes, a price that Speier’s American driver found exorbitant because he could buy a whole pack of smokes at the PX for four cents. The preciousness of cigarettes in the local economy created a new profession: that of Kippensammler, or butt collector. Hovering near the entrances to soldiers’ clubs and cinemas, the butt snatchers swooped down on discarded fag ends as soon as they hit the pavement. Berlin’s waiters also got into the butt business, selling the leavings from ashtrays. At the Café Wien waiters received five dollars for the seventy-five to one hundred butts a day they collected.