CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

BERLIN: THE GRAY CITY

For most of May and June, Francesca Wilson remained in the small lakeside town of Tutzing. Almost next door to her lay the villa of Frau Ludendorff, the widow of General Erich Ludendorff, chief of staff to Hindenburg in the First World War and the real power behind the throne during the Kaiser’s war. The villa had been requisitioned to house a group of US Army officers, but the Americans allowed the elderly German and her sister to visit during daylight hours, before the start of the night-time curfew.

One evening, Francesca was invited over with other members of the UNRRA team to hear Frau Ludendorff’s sister, a well-known pianist, play music by Schumann. It was not a large house, but it was packed with the heavy, solid furnishings of Junker Germany and filled with memorabilia. The general’s memoirs lined the bookshelves, and his portraits ringed the walls: Ludendorff as a baby, Ludendorff as a schoolboy, Ludendorff as a soldier. There was even a portrait of Ludendorff looking Napoleonic, wearing a cloak on a battlefield.

After the First World War, he had emerged as a diehard opponent of the new, democratic Weimar Germany, and in 1920 joined hands with Wolfgang Kapp, a fellow right-wing nationalist, to head an attempted coup against the government in Berlin. Three years later, he marched alongside Adolf Hitler during the notorious Munich putsch. And he served as a Nazi member of the Reichstag until falling out of favor with the party. On his death in 1937, Hitler gave him a state funeral.

The copies of Mein Kampf had already been removed from his library, but as Francesca browsed the shelves, she came across the collected works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. After settling in Germany, he had joined the Bayreuth circle of nationalist intellectuals influenced by the anti-Semitic ideas of Richard Wagner and married the composer’s daughter. His book The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century argued that the “white” or “Aryan” race was superior to all others. Hitler praised him as a prophet of the Third Reich.

The widow Ludendorff was a doctor by profession, and famous in the 1920s as a standard-bearer of Hitler’s ideas. The author of several books of her own on the fashionable racial theories of the day, she had expounded on the dangers of Catholicism and Judaism, the falseness of Christianity, and the need for a new and “authentic” Teutonic religion. Indeed, Francesca was led to believe, it was because of her influence that her husband threw his weight behind Hitler and his abortive putsch. Unlike Hitler, who spent the next six months in prison writing Mein Kampf, Ludendorff was acquitted at his ensuing trial.

As she sat and listened to the Schumann, Francesca glanced around the small, oppressive room. Among the select audience of attentive American officers sat Frau Ludendorff herself, dignified and calm, wearing a high-collared dress and looking considerably younger than her age. Probably, thought Francesca, she still believes all that racial theory. But what future, she wondered, could the elderly widow now see for the ideas she had once so earnestly preached, as she sat surrounded by Hitler’s “mongrel race” of Americans?¹

There were other reminders that prewar attitudes had not vanished with Germany’s defeat. Soon afterwards, Francesca met a scientist whom she referred to simply as “Dr. X.” His small cottage in Bavaria was marked with a huge “off limits” notice. He had worked on the V2 rocket program and was evacuated from Peenemunde when it seemed as though Bavaria might hold out as part of the Alpine Redoubt. She visited him in his modest bed-sitting room that now also served as his laboratory.

Expecting to meet a man of mature years, instead she found a tall, blond young man who spoke with a north German accent. “He looked overgrown and pale,” she wrote, “like a plant forced in a cellar, but he was bland and self-possessed.” He was also stiff, correct and exceedingly polite. Francesca took an immediate dislike to the detached way he spoke about the Nazi rockets, but she was curious about their range and aim. He admitted that they had not always hit their targets, but, he added, they were far better by the end.

“How are you going to use them now there is peace?” she asked.

“Well,” he responded, “there is no reason why there shouldn’t be a postal service. It should be possible to shoot letters to New York. They would take about forty minutes.”

“But what else?” persisted Francesca.

The scientist said something about Venus and Mars, and his two associates, who were also present, chimed in enthusiastically. After a while, Dr. X interjected that all such speculation was amusing, but not important. “We scientists,” he said, “know our limitations now and . . . realize that we are more dangerous than beneficial. Only doctors still retain their nineteenth-century conceit and even imagine that they will produce life some day. Science,” he added, “will never create anything uncreated nor can it explain a single mystery. It lives in a quantity world and ignores quality.”

No doubt, thought Francesca, this cold man regretted that Hitler’s “miracle” weapon had failed to meet its creators’ hopes. “When did you know that the war was lost?” she asked abruptly.

“Stalingrad was a landmark,” he replied. “But in reality it was lost after Dunkirk with the Battle of Britain.” He went on to tell her that the Germans had completely miscalculated the enormous build up of air power in Britain and the United States. As a result, the Third Reich had started to build underground factories far too late. And they relied on supplies such as shell-cases from Upper Silesia. “When that fell to the Russians,” he explained, “we were sunk. Nothing to do but wait for the end with hands folded.”

Behind him, Francesca noted a small row of stones on a shelf. She told him they reminded her of the collection of pebbles she had as a child. The scientist held a match against a red stone, which ignited, then fell to the floor and burned out harmlessly. It left behind a stifling smell. “It was pleasant to leave to go out into the starlit night,” Francesca wrote, “and find the planets still cool and inaccessible, as though there were no Mephistophelian scientists plotting to disturb their inviolability.”²

There were still plenty of Nazis in Bavaria. Indeed, some of them were already worming their way back into public life. Others had never even left. Under Charles Keegan, denazification and demilitarization were proving something of a mockery.

At the end of May, Keegan appointed Dr. Fritz Schaeffer, a former inmate of Dachau, as Minister-President of Bavaria. But Schaeffer’s much-vaunted stay behind Nazi barbed wire had been brief, and his democratic credentials were feeble at best, for he was a veteran of the arch-conservative and ultra-nationalist Bavarian People’s Party. No sooner did he take office than he began to appoint unreconstructed nationalists, militarists and even former Nazis to high office. His minister of economics had enriched himself under the Nazis, thanks to his friendship with the local Gauleiter. The head of the Ministry of the Interior had been chief of a pan-German nationalist propaganda front used by the Nazis and the Minister of Education was doing his best to frustrate any fundamental denazification of Bavaria’s educational system. Patton was relaxed about all of this, and even went on the offensive against Eisenhower, claiming that denazification was removing too many experienced people from office. The two men were still at odds over the issue as the summer of 1945 came to an end. All too little appeared to have changed in Bavaria.³

It wasn’t just Nazis in Germany who espoused nationalist or racist ideas and attitudes. Poles, Russians and Slavs in general were still widely despised, even more so now, given the widespread post-war looting and crime wave launched by freed slave workers. And, disturbingly, anti-Semitic views remained entrenched. While some Germans were genuinely horrified by Auschwitz, others continued to regard Jews as a race apart–and definitely unequal. Despite all the revelations about the Nazi death camps, such prejudices could still be found even among the “compassionate” professions, as one Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald learned that summer. After being liberated by the Americans, he found himself living in a camp outside Jena. As a qualified doctor, he was helping fellow survivors recuperate in a hospital staffed by friendly and cooperative German nurses and technicians. One day, he had to take a patient’s urine specimen to the lab for analysis. While there, he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, which revealed the Auschwitz number tattooed on his left arm. “What is that?” asked the young female assistant, an attractive girl to whom he had taken a bit of a fancy. He told her. She had heard the American broadcasts about Auschwitz on the radio, but wanted to know if it was true that people had been killed in gas chambers. He confirmed that it was. Her response chilled him to the core: “But those were only Jews, weren’t they?”⁴

Such attitudes, as well as horrendous wartime experiences, helped explain what Francesca saw happening at the Feldafing camp. More than ever, she was aware that under Lieutenant Smith it was becoming a specifically Jewish camp. She decided that a Jewish woman who could speak Yiddish would carry out the welfare work far better than she herself could.

Zionism was spreading like wildfire through the camp. The majority of the Jews still housed there were Polish. “Palestine was Holy Land” to them, Francesca noted–and it was the only place clamoring for them, too. Convoys of young men left mysteriously in the night, ostensibly bound for Italy, but the word “Palestine” was loudly whispered. Rumors of pogroms in Poland increased the dread of return there and fueled Zionist dreams. The arrival nearby of the Jewish Brigade in late June intensified these feelings among the legions of Jewish DPs scattered throughout Bavaria. The brigade was a five-thousand-strong British Army unit formed of Jewish volunteers who had fought behind the Zionist standard and the star of David.

Throughout Bavaria, similar sentiment was growing rapidly in all the camps. In the eyes of UNRRA, Jews were not considered as a distinct national group, but as Polish, Romanian, or Soviet nationals–and thus they were supposed to return to Poland, Romania or the Soviet Union. But most were unwilling to do so, and with no alternative on offer, feelings of Jewish solidarity deepened and were encouraged by some influential figures. One such was an American military rabbi, Dr. Abraham Klausner, who arrived at Dachau at the end of May and eventually, thanks to UNRRA, set up an office in Munich where he tirelessly pressured the American occupation authorities to recognize the Jews as a distinct group.

With a number of sympathizers such as Lieutenant Smith at Feldafing, it was no surprise that the camp was the scene of a momentous decla-ration that summer. On Sunday 1 July, forty-three Jewish delegates from across Bavaria met there to formulate a policy for the future. The assembly’s final act was to pass a resolution directed at the allied powers who were about to meet at Potsdam, asking that all Jews who wished to emigrate to Palestine should be allowed to do so as the first step towards creating a Jewish state. It was a significant turning point. The story of the liberation from Nazism was ending and a new one was beginning: this was the start of the struggle to create the state of Israel.⁵

While Jews in the camps of Europe wrestled with their future, the fate of Trieste was being decided in Italy. Since liberation, life for many Italians under Yugoslav rule in the city had felt more like prison than freedom. By contrast, among many Slovenes both there and in villages throughout Venezia Giulia, enthusiasm for Tito ran high.

So did military tension. The opposing armies remained on the alert while Churchill and Truman demanded that Tito back down and they put heavy diplomatic pressure on Stalin to twist the arm of his ally. It was the first real example of the challenge facing the West as depicted by Churchill in his “iron curtain” telegram to Truman. “This is a small problem,” declared the Italian writer Gaetano Salvemini in The Times, “but it is a test case of the method by which larger analogous difficulties will be calmed–or envenomed, and World War Three made unavoidable within the next few years.”⁶

But Stalin was not yet ready to try the West’s resolve by openly defying his allies, and he refused to throw his support behind Tito. This forced the Yugoslav dictator to retreat. Four weeks after VE Day, he finally agreed to withdraw his forces from a large part of the contested province, including the cities of Trieste, Gorizia and Monfalcone.

Within days, the Yugoslavs began to evacuate the territory and abandon the frontier on the Isonzo they had coveted for so long. Geoffrey Cox and the New Zealanders watched as on foot, in motor vehicles and in long horse-drawn convoys thousands of Tito’s troops headed sullenly east and south, leaving Trieste behind them. They did not go empty-handed, though. Ignoring the fine print of the agreement, they stripped machinery and accessories from garages, and emptied barracks, hotels and houses of their contents. “The amount of loot,” noted one official source, “seemed to be limited only by the paucity of transport.”⁷ In the areas they quit, the allies moved in quickly to establish military government. “So ended the struggle for Trieste,” remarked Cox, still toiling away in the intelligence truck at General Freyberg’s headquarters at Miramare Castle.

He was too optimistic. The allies had certainly won the diplomatic war and made the Yugoslav forces withdraw, but a political battle now broke out to rid the city of Tito’s influence. During the month that the Yugoslavs occupied Trieste, they purged its administration of unfriendly Italians and placed communists and their sympathizers in dozens of important positions. In the weeks that followed, allied military government struggled hard to counteract their influence. In early July, two months after VE Day and four weeks after Tito’s forces reluctantly straggled out of the city, British intelligence issued a pessimistic report. Throughout the region, it observed, the occupying forces were faced with continuous passive obstruction from local councils of liberation encouraged by hostile propaganda from Belgrade Radio and an unfriendly local press.

In Trieste itself, there were Yugoslav “stay-behind” organizations numbering in total between six and seven thousand people, of whom about half were probably former members of the Yugoslav Army. The Guardia del Popolo, or people’s militia, was formally dissolved at the end of June amid protests and riots, but it clandestinely retained its identity and its members had caches of arms. Many of them volunteered for the new police force being created by the allies in the hope of penetrating and influencing it.

The scene in Trieste was thus far from simple, and its future certainly was not settled. The past and the present eddied around each other in a witches’ brew of ethnic and political antagonism. “Agents-provocateurs, trained propagandists, and toughs are the normal tools of any political party in the Balkans,” reported British intelligence. But their activities in Trieste were due to the continuing significance attached to the city by the Yugoslavs and the underground experience they had gained in fighting the Germans. There was also a powerful and legitimate sense of grievance among the Slovenes that was easily exploited by Tito’s propagandists. They had been systematically and actively persecuted by the Italians during the twenty years of Mussolini’s dictatorship, and the communists had good reason to mistrust a large percentage of the Italian population in the region. After all, as British intelligence recognized, it had “as bad a record of collaboration with both Nazis and Fascists as any area in Italy.”⁸

Three days before this report was circulated to allied units in Venezia Giulia, a particularly brutal case of mass murder in an adjacent Italian province showed that settling the score with Fascists remained an issue equally alive in the rest of the country. On the night of Friday 6 July, a group of fifteen masked men approached the prison at Schio, an industrial town in the province of Vicenza. Situated in an otherwise conservative and Catholic area, it had a militant workers’ movement and was a hotbed of wartime partisan activity. The men forced the head jailer to hand over the keys, cut the telephone lines and forced the other guards to leave.

Inside were about a hundred prisoners, both men and women, accused of various Fascist misdemeanors. Most were little more than small-time supporters of Mussolini, but at least one was alleged to have sent local anti-Fascists to Mauthausen. As the masked men broke in, chaos broke out. The prisoners refused to organize in groups as ordered and the intruders opened fire. Finally, fifty-four prisoners lay dead, thirteen of them women. The perpetrators were local communist partisans. It was the worst single incident of such violence over the summer of 1945, but it was by no means the last, and killings of Fascists would continue into the following year.

This was yet another reminder that, for Italy, the Second World War was also a civil war scarred deep with fraternal hatred. Yet feelings ran particularly high because of Fascism’s intimate links with German Nazism. The massacre at Schio followed closely on the return to the town of a survivor from Mauthausen and the screening of film footage about the liberation of other Nazi camps. Popular outrage, combined with a growing fear that justice might never be done, produced an inflammatory and lynch-mob mood. The post-war Italian government had not yet established control over its people.⁹

The death and violence of war was much on the mind of Robert Ellis. The machine-gun-squad leader in the US Tenth Mountain Division was still stationed near Udine in northeast Italy. His All Quiet on the Western Front nightmare of being killed in the last hour of the war had subsided, but left behind were the dreadful scenes of battlefield carnage he had survived. He was a thoughtful and sensitive son who shared many of his deepest feelings frankly with his parents. Many young soldiers writing home kept a relentlessly upbeat tone, so as not to worry their families. Ellis was an exception.

The first day of July was a Sunday. By now, it was getting hot even early in the day, so he sat down and wrote another long letter to his mother and father. He had just turned down the offer of an appointment at West Point Military Academy, having come to despise almost every aspect of army life. “I’ve seen enough ghastly battles and death to last me a long time,” he confessed in an outpouring of feeling. “In a way I’m glad I did see combat for I’ve got the true picture of what war is like aside from all the hullabaloo and glamour.” War for the infantryman was not a pretty sight, he explained. It was no longer a battle of individuals but purely impersonal, machine versus machine. “You never associate the enemy soldier with your hatred,” he went on. “You hate the shells screaming overhead, you hate the bullets singing by your ears coming from an unseen force, but you see the enemy only as a distant spot, like a target on the rifle range.” War was no longer man against man, spear against spear, but just a “vast holocaust” of destruction through which bewildered soldiers moved like automatons. True, there were moments of heroism, but mostly it was a matter of braving bullets and shells and hoping to emerge alive at the other side. He had probably killed many men, he admitted, but the only one whose face he had seen was the sniper he had shot with his pistol.¹⁰

With the outbreak of peace, his emotions were riding a roller coaster. The regimental “F” Company reports through June and July spoke blandly of the food being good and the morale high, as though one fed simply off the other. Yet they also recorded events that sent Ellis’s spirits plunging. It was hardly reassuring or comforting to attend briefings on “Jap tactics,” or to be shown a movie entitled On the Road to Tokyo, especially after Tito’s backdown removed most of their reason for being in Italy and brought a likely transfer to the Pacific ever closer. Nor did it help to be constantly training for some future ground attack or, for that matter, to be lectured about venereal disease.¹¹

There were a few bright spots. Ellis was awarded the Bronze Star, he was playing and winning regular competitive tennis with a partner, and he was finally feeling more comfortable giving orientation lectures to the men. But overall, his mood was edgy. Like dozens of others in the division he wanted out of any future fighting. But all his efforts at shifting into something less dangerous than being an infantryman hauling a machine-gun–such as being assigned to permanent occupation duties, becoming a divisional historian, or joining the military police–came to nothing. Frustrated, he watched as many of his buddies somehow managed the trick while he remained behind.

It hit particularly hard when his best friend in the company, Larry Boyajian, left for military police duty with the Fifth Army in Austria. Ellis had lost a number of good buddies either killed or wounded, and Larry was the only one he could still really talk to. They had survived some amazing experiences together, from the terrifying mortar attack in mid-April and his shooting of the sniper that had won him the Bronze Star to their madcap ride in the German staff car. “He’ll never make it to the Pacific now,” noted Ellis enviously of his friend.¹²

But what really punched him in the stomach was the letter he received from his girlfriend Pat, who had been the “light of his life” ever since he had left the States. It was the “Dear John” heartbreak letter familiar to thousands of other young men serving overseas. The day after Larry left, Ellis made a laconic entry in his diary: “Pat maintains again she doesn’t love me, but hopes to when I return. Beginning to regard the bachelor’s life as best. I’m getting used to it.”¹³

Getting back into the swing of married and family life was exactly what British ex–war correspondent Robert Reid was happily doing. “Gosh, how good it’s going to be watching Dicky riding his bike, and Elizabeth going around like a big girl, and you darling,” he typed to his wife, Vera, before leaving Austria on his tour home via Berchtesgaden and Paris. It was not just ten-year-old Elizabeth who was growing up fast. Richard, aged eight, had picked up enough of the news to pontificate solemnly on VE Day that only half the war was over and that “we still have to fight the Japs.”¹⁴

In the days following the German surrender, Vera could hardly contain her impatience to have her husband back home. His letter telling her of his plans to return slowly had not yet arrived, so she took matters into her own hands and phoned the Manchester BBC office, asking them to contact London and find out the date of his return. The children’s Whitsun holiday was coming up and she certainly did not want to take them to their grandmother’s only to find her husband standing at the door when they returned, waiting to get in. But London seemed clueless. “Just come home,” she wrote impatiently to Robert a week after VE Day, “it seems to me your job is finished, anyway I should make it so.” What clinched it as far as she was concerned was that recently all the news from Patton’s Third Army seemed to be coming from Reid’s BBC colleague, Frank Gillard, and not from her husband. Her jealous, loyal loathing of Gillard continued. She once even told Robert she would happily strangle the man. It was definitely time for Reid to get home.

By early June, he was. Four years before, he had proudly put on his brand-new uniform with its green and gold shoulder tabs bearing the words “British War Correspondent” and the circular green and gold cap badge with the single letter “C” in the center. He also had a blue War Office identity pass containing a slip of paper saying that if he was taken prisoner, he was to be treated like an officer with the rank of captain. Happily, he never had to use it, and now his uniform was already gathering dust. Each morning, instead of clambering into a jeep for a bone-rattling, day-long ride to the battlefront for a story, he was commuting from home near Stockport into Manchester and the BBC regional office to carry out his role as north regional publicity officer. Robert Reid’s war was definitely over.

But for American paratrooper Leonard Linton, the most fascinating part of his war was yet to come. Hardly had he arrived back in France than rumors began to fly that the division was destined for Berlin, where its mission was to serve as part of the allied occupation force. For the Eighty-second Airborne, as for every other allied fighting unit in Europe, Hitler’s capital had always been the goal. Only a few weeks before, the All-Americans had come close to making a parachute drop into the city before Eisenhower decided otherwise and let the Soviets take the city.

But this did not undo the wartime agreement giving the Western allies post-war control of the three western sectors of the German capital. There had been weeks of high-level negotiation with Stalin about making their arrival in Berlin coincide with their withdrawal from parts of eastern Germany that had been assigned to the Soviets, such as Thuringia and Mecklenburg. Throughout May and June, Churchill urged the Americans not to withdraw their troops from beyond the Elbe before the Potsdam Conference, during which their presence could be used as a bargaining tool with Stalin. But Truman decided otherwise, and late in June the massive shift of forces began, with American forces also leaving those western parts of Czechoslovakia they had entered during the last few days of fighting. There was just one crumb of consolation for Churchill. Soviet forces in the British zone of Austria now also withdrew into their own zone, thus virtually guaranteeing that Austria, at least, would not slip behind the Iron Curtain.

As the Americans left, they took with them hundreds of German scientists, along with their equipment and their families. A few days later, the American chiefs of staff gave their approval to “Operation Overcast,” an ambitious program to transfer more than three hundred of Germany and Austria’s best scientists to the United States. “Overcast” marked the culmination of efforts that started before D-Day with the drawing up of lists of the main scientific targets in Germany. After entering Germany, a special unit inside SHAEF known as T-Force hunted down targets and removed equipment from such major prizes as the V2 plant at Nordhausen. The allies were astonished to discover how advanced German science and technology was in many different fields. The British chiefs of staff in July 1945 concluded that Germany was “well in advance” of Britain in the fields of high-speed aerodynamics, ballistics and rocketry.¹⁵

Alarmed by this, the allies’ first priority was to determine what had been passed on by the Nazis to the Japanese. Then they bent their efforts to preventing as much as possible from falling into Soviet hands. Finally, they decided to harness as many as possible of the best German scientific brains to their own military and scientific needs. “The more that is learnt of German preparations and progress with new weapons,” declared The Times at the end of June, “the more apparent is it that the allies ended the war with Germany just in time . . . It is not too much to say that the Germans were in the act of switching from one kind of war to another.” It was all the more important, therefore, to recruit Germany’s scientists for allied purposes. Wernher von Braun, the youthful genius behind the V2 rocket who gladly turned himself over to the Americans in May 1945, was only one of several dozen German scientists to move almost immediately to America.¹⁶

As the allies pulled out of eastern Germany, the Soviets withdrew from the western sectors of Berlin. Here, the allies hoped to stage a grand and symbolic entrance into the defeated capital. But Stalin was equally determined to show who was really boss on the ground, and as he controlled access to the city, he found plenty of ways to spoil the show. The result was a delayed and staggered entry.

Linton was one of the first Americans to reach the city, as his unit was designated as an advance guard of the Eighty-second Airborne’s occupation force. Luckily, he still had the little Berlin street map picked up in Paris in April, when he thought he would be parachuting into the German capital. His unit set off in convoy along the deserted Hanover-Berlin autobahn. They were half expecting to be stopped, but they crossed without trouble through the Soviet checkpoint at the small town of Helmstedt, where rough wooden poles and oil drums marked the makeshift zonal border. At fifteen- or twenty-mile intervals, they passed huge signs in Russian praising Lenin and the Red Army. Linton translated the slogans for the others in his jeep.

At about the same time, eighty press jeeps carrying more than two hundred allied correspondents was also speeding towards the city. This convoy had an unexpected encounter with an advance guard of the Red Army, which was moving in the opposite direction to replace the Americans withdrawing from Thuringia. The freshly painted and polished allied armored vehicles contrasted sharply with those of the Russians. “The outbound Russians were a rabble,” reported one of the Western correspondents.

Their padded cotton jackets were grease-stained and threadbare, their transport a hodgepodge of antiquated trucks and horse-drawn wagons piled high with looted furniture, and more than half of them traveled on foot. But these were the men who had beaten Hitler’s vast armies on the Eastern Front. They looked inured to hardship, and utterly indifferent to the show of mechanized might put on to impress them.

Eventually, Linton’s unit reached Potsdam. The great palaces built by Frederick the Great stood empty and wrecked, although their treasures were now being unearthed from salt mines and caves across Germany. But the paratroopers did not stop. Instead, they drove on past burned-out Soviet tanks, deserted and shallow foxholes hastily improvised by the Germans, and increasing piles of rubble. “I could readily visualize the Wehrmacht caught completely off guard by the Red Army,” Linton recorded, “after they encircled Berlin.”

Finally, they reached the heart of the city itself.¹⁷

The Americans officially took control of their sector of Berlin on Wednesday 4 July, Independence Day. In a brief ceremony held at the Adolf Hitler Barracks, General Baranov, the local Soviet commander, formally passed responsibility over to General Omar Bradley.

Hours before, an American journalist, James O’Donnell, had flown into the city to establish Newsweek’s German bureau in the capital. He was also on an urgent mission to write up the last days of Hitler in the bunker. To get speedily from Tempelhof Airport to the Chancellery, he flagged down a passing jeep, the only moving object he could see in the static urban silence. Its occupants were a couple of Eighty-second Airborne paratroopers, who happily volunteered to show him the Brandenburg Gate–if he could show them where it was. Laboriously, they wound their way through the labyrinths of rubble along the only path cleared for vehicles. They would have gone faster, thought O’Donnell, in a Sherman tank or a bulldozer.¹⁸

The main body of British troops arrived the next day, marching in under the stony but interested gaze of spectators who lined the route into the city from Spandau. Pride of place was given to men of the Seventh Armored Division, the so-called Desert Rats, men who had started this journey five years before in the North African desert. The ceremony was held in drizzling rain at the foot of the Victory Column, the great statue erected to commemorate Germany’s crushing defeat of the French in 1871. The Union Jack was unfurled, and green-uniformed members of the German police force offered a smart salute. The landmark column stood on the great east-west axis running through the Tiergarten that led to the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond, lay Unter den Linden and the Soviet sector. Only a few weeks before, the avenue had served as an emergency landing strip for Nazis as the Red Army tightened its grip around the city. Local British, American, Russian and French commanders watched as the troops marched past, the salute was taken and the national anthem was played.¹⁹

That same day, electors went to the polls in Britain in the country’s first general election since 1935. The British troops in Berlin, as elsewhere across Europe and overseas, were allowed to cast their ballots where they were stationed. Both Conservatives and Labour, the two main parties, felt confident of victory. The day before, Churchill had made a final grand tour of London constituencies and was widely lauded as the man who led his country to victory. But at one meeting, he received a very mixed reception and was booed. It was a straw in the wind.

Leonard Linton’s arrival in Berlin was not just a conquest but a homecoming. He got up early the morning after he arrived and headed in his jeep towards the residential district of Schoneberg. The rubble in the streets was piled so high that he had to take endless detours. So many buildings were wrecked or gone altogether that he could not always recognize where he was or the direction in which he was heading, and in the end his little map proved of little use. Instead, he relied on the sun’s position to guide him. There was still no petrol supply, water supply was erratic, and many of the city’s trams had been turned into barricades. Their derelict hulks still littered the streets and made his progress all the more tortuous. Eventually, though, he found the apartment block on Aschaffenburger Strasse where his family had lived before the war. It was here that he had learned the German that he now used every day, and where he had flirted innocently and briefly with the Hitler Youth. But the building was nothing more than a roofless and hollowed-out shell, with nothing to keep him there but memories.

He had better luck tracing his half-sister, Irene, last seen before the rest of the family fled from the Nazis. William Shirer, the American journalist who was back in the city from where he had reported vividly on the rise of the Nazis, helped Linton track her down to a partially destroyed building. There she was living with Inge Zimmerman, a friend from prewar days, and her family. Two of Inge’s brothers had been killed on the Eastern Front, and the third injured. They were all haggard, but insisted they were fine–at least none of them was sick or obviously starving.

Irene had been raped by the Russians when they captured the city. Linton was able to arrange for her to have a prompt medical examination, and to her relief she learned she had not contracted a venereal disease. After a while, he was also able to help her move to the upmarket area of Wannsee. The only thing that jarred was the presence nearby of a Soviet war monument featuring a T34 tank, supposedly the first Red Army tank to enter the city. Linton found it disturbing that its cannon was still facing west.²⁰

Irene and her friends were no worse off than most of the Berlin population. Two months after Hitler’s suicide, the special correspondent for The Times painted a vivid picture of a city still “numbed and prostrate” from the cataclysm that had swept over it. The people who remained were mostly women, children and old men, their energies determinedly focused on getting enough food to eat day by day in order to survive. Compared with the bustling prewar scene, there was barely a flicker of movement along the broad avenues in the center of the city, where people trudged along with bowed heads and burdened backs. On top of the high mounds of rubble from the bombed and shelled buildings, the correspondent reported, great human chains, formed mostly of women, were shifting the debris with buckets that looked ludicrously small for the task. His report was datelined Thursday 5 July, the same day that the news broke of the continued euthanasia killings at the Kaufbeuren Institute in Bavaria.²¹

A young British officer reached Berlin at the same time as Leonard Linton and had an instant and overwhelming reaction to what met his eyes. The city was dominated by a single color. “The ruins were gray, the trees were gray, the houses were gray, even people’s faces were gray,” wrote Richard Brett-Smith of Hitler’s devastated capital. “About all the uprooted dwellings and smashed and acrid rubble hung a thin gray dust which chalked the clothes and faces of those who poked about in them, the prying visitors, the ghouls, and the Trummerfrauen or gangs of women sorting bricks.” Everywhere, it seemed, despair, apathy and aimlessness seemed to have taken root.²² Yet the gangs of women sorting bricks were also, paradoxically, a sign of life and renewal. And they were not the only ones hard at work.

One of the minor industries in Berlin was the collecting of cigarette butts. Once these were amalgamated into new cigarettes they acted as valuable currency–perhaps the most important item of barter and exchange that summer. “Enterprising people who had a corner in cigarette paper, or had acquired superfine toilet paper,” explained one senior British officer, “employed hundreds of people, children among them, to collect cigarette ends.” The collectors were known as Kippensammler, and all had their special beats, like prostitutes or beggars. They struck deals with chambermaids, head waiters, and cinema and cabaret managers. Gangs of boys hovered around the entrances to allied messes, troops’ clubs and cinemas, ready to pounce when someone stubbed out a cigarette or threw it, still smoking, to the ground. Many waiters collected ends as assiduously as they once had tips. All across the city, small factories sprang up in abandoned or bombed-out buildings, where small armies of men and women sorted the tobacco and rolled and gummed newly formed cigarettes.

The cigarette was small, could be stored in compact containers, was not quickly perishable, and was always in high demand. The most desirable were English and American brands. For the very best, the going rate was between seven and ten marks per cigarette. Discarded cigarette packets were also in high demand. If packed carefully, they could be made to look original and command a higher price.

“It was not long,” reported the British officer, “before the Allied soldier realized the vast purchasing and persuasive power he had in his possession of cigarettes.” As he was handed out free cigarettes by the army, he could make money out of them, save all his pay, and purchase at knockdown prices a vast array of goods flooding the market, such as fountain pens, jewels, watches, antiques, diamonds and binoculars. “The demand for cigarettes was so great,” reported the officer, “that many inveterate smokers rationed themselves, or even gave up smoking, to take advantage of the market.”

Another British soldier in Berlin was making so much money that it began to haunt him. “I hid the money in all kinds of places, in my old kit bag, in old socks, in the lining of my tunic,” he confessed. “The money began to get on my mind, and I couldn’t sleep. I used to go into the latrine and count it. I remember one day counting, to my horror, eight thousand marks. That came to £200, and I had never had more than £5 in my life. I decided that I must get rid of it, and at a faster rate.”

Hardly any of the cigarettes were actually smoked by the person who bought them. “They passed from person to person at a profit, or in payment for glass for windows, for wood, food and clothes,” noted the British officer. “One packet of cigarettes might change hands a hundred times and, in its travels, bring to a succession of people the things on which their lives or their health depended.”²³

It was no wonder that at least one of the city’s nightclubs, the Kabaret Roxy, carried a sign outside its door announcing: “ALLES FüR 10 ZIGARETTEN.” And behind the whole phenomenon there lurked a grim and ironic joke. It had taken Hitler, a non-smoker, to reduce his capital to this.

The allied soldier with an endless supply of cigarettes was a powerful figure. He could also easily buy sex, as the soldier who had begun to lose sleep over his money soon found out. One day, he went to a café where he had been many times before. There, sitting in her usual place, was a German girl of about eighteen. She always sat alone and drank what looked like colored water. This time, the British soldier went over to her and bought her a drink. Until then, he had not taken much notice of any women in Berlin–he had been married only a couple of years. She looked like an English girl of twenty-two or twenty-three, he thought, and was fair with blue eyes, but very pale. She spoke no English, and he spoke no German, but he took her to a dance and paid for her meal. “I felt like a millionaire!” he said. Then he took her home on a tram. After that, they met several more times, going to either the cinema or a dance. All the time, he could see she was hungry.

He began to feel first sorry for her, then responsible for her. “She was nice, so pathetically gay,” he explained. She reminded him of a stray dog that would not leave his heels and would starve if he did not take care of her. After a while, they learned how to exchange some words. Once he gave her a bar of chocolate, and she nearly went crazy. At another time, he handed her a piece of soap, which she immediately sold for fifty marks to buy bread on the black market.

One night it was raining. She took him by the arm and led him to the block of flats where she lived. It had been hit by artillery, and the top two floors were burned out. She lived on the third floor and had two rooms and a small kitchen. There was no glass left in the windows, but cloth and boards had been fitted to make the place private. There was a photograph in one room of her mother, who had killed herself when the Russians reached the city. Her father had been killed in the fighting. There was a photograph of him, too.

“I made a sign to ask if there was any food in the house, and she thought I wanted to eat,” he said. “She went to a cupboard and I followed her. In the cupboard were a few potatoes, a cupful of flour and some salt. Half a loaf was wrapped in newspaper and she offered me that. I shook my head. It was not easy to make her understand that I did not want to eat anything.” Most of the furniture had been taken by the Russians, and there was no coal or wood for heating. The place was cold. In the bedroom, there were no beds, just two settees. She pushed them together. Later, she told him she was going out into the countryside for a couple of days to hunt for potatoes. He could not stand it anymore. Opening his wallet, he handed her four fifty-mark notes. “She did not want them,” he said. “She cried.”

Sometimes, he felt almost sick about the power he had over her. “She was just like my slave,” he said, “she darned my socks and mended things for me.” There was no question of marriage, and she knew it. Still, she found him a Leica camera in exchange for cigarettes, and he gave her his money to look after. She told him she knew where she could also find a diamond ring.²⁴

This was the Berlin now occupied by the allies. No wonder the city was known as a “sentimental desert.” Everywhere, women went about alone. The number of German men in the city had halved since 1939, and there were nearly three women to every man, many of whom were wounded, unemployed or penniless. Marriage bureaus sprang up, but they were of no help to women who could provide no proof that their husbands had been killed in an air raid or at the front. “So, in cellar dives and basements,” writes Douglas Botting, “the tribe of Frauleins mingled with the Allied soldiery and plied their trade in half-destroyed rooms among the ruins.”²⁵ This was the city that would soon be hosting Stalin, Truman and Churchill at the “Victory” conference.