Whereas I was fortunate enough to have lived in Bosnia for six years, and so was able to use much of what I had seen and learned and done in crafting The Man from Berlin and The Pale House, I was faced with a very different situation for The Divided City. When considering occupied Germany and Berlin and the postwar years, the reader or historian can be overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of information.
The Divided City does not aim to be a novel about postwar Germany: It is the story of one man’s investigation through Berlin in early 1947. As such, I have related events through Reinhardt’s eyes, resisting the temptation to wrap everything in allegory. There is no shortage of books, many of them excellent, on the situation in postwar Germany. There are so many that I will go into no great depth here on the overall situation, but rather attempt to add historical detail to those elements of the postwar context that Reinhardt was faced with in his investigation.
—
In early 1947, the time in which The Divided City is set, the Second World War had been over nearly two years. Although the guns had fallen silent, the war’s effects lingered on, and the peace had thrown up problems all its own.
Following Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, and in line with wartime Allied planning, the country was divided up into three zones of military occupation, with the French zone later added to make a fourth. The American zone was centered on Frankfurt, the British on Bad Oeynhausen, the French in Baden-Baden, and the Soviets in Berlin. Divided as it was into four sectors, Berlin was a microcosm of the occupation itself.
In August 1945 the Potsdam Conference, the last time the leaders of the victorious powers met in person, addressed Germany’s political future. The country would be run by an Allied Control Council in Berlin. This council was to be made up of representatives—mainly military, but some civilian—who would jointly develop and implement policy and issue laws. Various subcommittees were established, including the Public Security Committee, which, in October 1946, reformed Berlin’s police force. Although the council functioned well enough initially, the tension between the Allies quickly began to come to the fore, especially concerning economic policy, denazification, and the devolution of powers back to the Germans. Some of these tensions manifested themselves in October 1946 in the first free and fair elections in Germany since 1933. Across Western Germany, parties of the social democratic type were largely victorious, often led by Germans, such as Konrad Adenauer, who had a history of resistance to the Nazis. In the Soviet zone, the Socialist Unity Party—a Soviet-enforced merger of the Social Democrats and the German Communists—was victorious, largely because it had no opposition. In Berlin, however, it was trounced in a clear rejection of the Soviets by the city’s inhabitants.
—
The elections, as well as the relations between the Allies, showed there were very different visions for Germany’s future and the role of Germans in it. The realities of the peace could no longer mask the divisions that the alliance against the Nazis had papered over. The treatment of former Nazis was one such issue.
Denazification progressed very differently within the four occupation zones, with various degrees of intensity and various methods of application. The British and Americans initially proceeded with vigor and enthusiasm, but the sheer numbers of people potentially involved overwhelmed them, coupled with the need to cut the costs of the occupation by getting Germany back on its feet and diminishing as well the potential for German revanchism. They were the first to hand responsibility for denazification back to German tribunals and panels in the late 1940s, a time when relations with the Soviets were deteriorating seriously and when it seemed likely the Germans would be needed as allies.
In the French zone, partly because the French made little distinction between Germans and Nazis, and partly because many of the officials appointed to govern it had themselves been officials in the Vichy regime, denazification never became an issue. In the Soviet zone, it took on dimensions of class warfare, with the Prussian aristocracy and officer class—men like von Vollmer—singled out for particular treatment. Their properties were seized and redistributed, and their traditional values of duty, obedience, and patriotism were considered as being coterminous with the Nazis’ values, or at the least had done nothing to inhibit the Nazis’ behavior.
Tens of millions of Germans were potentially affected by denazification. It would have been impossible to judge them all. Many former Nazis, or men and women who had supported them, thus eventually found their way back into positions of public and private authority and even respectability under all four occupying powers. Over time, the perceived failure of denazification became a convenient, if self-serving, stick with which the Soviets and East Germans would beat the Western Allies and West Germany. The sad fact is that all four of the Allies were complicit in denazification’s qualified successes, such as the Nuremburg trials of the major offenders, and its rather glaring failures, such as the ways in which some major offenders escaped prosecution while greater numbers of lesser offenders, or even people who had barely been complicit in the Nazi regime at all, suffered severe consequences.
—
As part of Germany’s surrender, the Allies had access to all that country’s patents and mined its technical expertise and intellectual development to the fullest. The boost this gave to Allied economies and companies was considerable. Of particular note is the race by all the Allies, especially the Americans and Soviets, for German scientists and know-how. Thousands of Germany’s scientists, doctors, technicians, chemists, and physicists were prized and sought-after assets, wooed, cajoled, persuaded, hunted, or kidnapped and exfiltrated to the USA or USSR. The US-led Operation Paperclip, which brought hundreds of German specialists in various spheres to live and work in the US, is perhaps the most infamous example of the lengths the Allies went to, although the Soviets had a similar program. Many of these scientists had been wholly complicit in the Nazi’s terror, or at least fully aware of it, and the Allies knew it. Men like Wernher von Braun, the director of the Peenemünde experimental facility, an expert in rocketry and one of the fathers of America’s future space program, had his membership in the Nazi Party and the SS expunged and his war record altered in order for him to be brought to work in the United States.
The human cost of German wartime scientific and technical advances was high. More people, mostly slave laborers from concentration camps, were worked to death or killed building the V2 ballistic missile than were actually killed by the weapon itself. The Germans also used human experimentation during the war. These macabre and revolting trials on living humans such as prisoners of war, Jews, homosexuals, political prisoners, the disabled, and children, were designed to further aims such as Nazi racial theories and medical experiments, or to aid in the military effort by testing the effects of various weapons or experimental surgery techniques. The air force did indeed conduct experiments on freezing and altitude, some of which were led by Dr. Sigmund Rascher at a facility in the Dachau concentration camp. Rascher and his experiments existed, but the squadron to which Andreas Noell was posted, that supposedly tested his findings, did not, although ones similar to it assuredly did.
Details of these experiments, and much else that the Nazi regime did, survived intact in records captured by the Allies or in the testimonies of survivors of the camps. The cliché of Germans’ mania for paperwork and records has substantial basis in fact. The complete personnel records of the Nazi Party, much of the SS’s records, as well as the records of dozens of Nazi-affiliated organizations were captured by American troops and placed in the Berlin Document Center. The armed forces’ records—the WASt, the Wehrmacht Information Office for War Losses and POWs—were also captured by the Americans and returned to Berlin where they were placed under French control. The WASt remains to this day an amazing repository of personnel information, housing millions of records of servicemen of all three branches of the German armed forces—army, navy, and air force—as well as information on prisoners, casualties, and war graves.
—
The divisions between the Allies were unfortunate because the tasks facing them were herculean and demanded cooperation and coordination. Destruction across the length and breadth of Germany was colossal. The Allies, particularly the Soviets, conducted widespread looting, expropriation, and dismantling of industry, indeed of anything of any value. Harvest and livestock were often requisitioned, leaving little for the population. Most of Germany’s cities had been heavily bombed by the British and American air forces. Berlin itself had been shattered by the war and solely occupied by the Red Army from the beginning of May to the beginning of July 1945, when British and American troops entered the city. The city was thoroughly sacked during the Soviet assault, and the population—particularly Berlin’s women—suffered the near-constant depredations of Red Army soldiers in the weeks that followed. Even today, traces of those last battles in April 1945 can be found.
The health and sanitation situation was grave as the country headed into one of the coldest winters in living memory. Diseases such as tuberculosis took virulent root, and there were outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and diphtheria. Rations were insufficient and malnutrition was rife. Basic services such as water and power took time to restore. Law and order and functioning local administration had to be put in place while ensuring neither became refuges for former Nazis. There were millions of displaced people, such as slave laborers and prisoners of war to care for and repatriate, not to mention the dire situation facing most Germans themselves. All this would have challenged any administration. As it was, and despite the genuine efforts of many Allied officials, the occupation was marked by inefficiencies in administration, vagaries among the zones, often strong degrees of callousness, with corruption a worsening element. Black markets were ubiquitous. The cost of occupation was also heavy on the occupiers, particularly for the all-but-bankrupt British, and another imperative in getting Germany back on its economic feet.
Millions of German civilians had fled west to escape the Red Army during the last months of the war. The end of the war saw millions more, overwhelmingly women, children, and the elderly, expelled in horrendous conditions from eastern Germany, from land ceded to Poland, or from eastern European states such as Czechoslovakia. Eastern Germany had been heavily fought over by the retreating Germans, whose scorched-earth tactics and desperate measures had brought misery on their own people, and by the advancing Soviets, who were ill-disposed to show any mercy or forbearance to the civilian populations they encountered. Millions were killed, disappeared, or died of maltreatment, disease, and exhaustion. Women and girls suffered horribly, especially at the hands of men of the Red Army and their allies. Suicide rates soared. Refugees fled as far west as they could, into Berlin or into the British and American zones, adding to the already dire humanitarian situation. But in the war’s aftermath, Germans and their needs were low on the pecking order—of all the Allies—for protection, assistance, and justice.
The behavior of Soviet soldiers could be highly unpredictable, with individuals capable of terrible brutality and callousness, but also of showing great kindness and consideration, especially to children, even if this aspect of their behavior has been somewhat romanticized. The Soviet war memorial in Treptower Park has a monumental statue of a Red Army soldier cradling a child in its arms. The statue was inspired by the actions of Red Army Sergeant Nikolai Masalov, who, during the assault on Berlin, rescued a young German girl while under heavy fire. Accounts abound of the lengths to which Soviet soldiers could be tender with children, even to the extent that Berlin’s women came to know that, if a child was with them, they were all but safe from molestation, and children became almost prized possessions, shared between friends and family.
—
As is so often the case with war and the population displacements that result, the burden of it fell unequally on women and children. Women and girls were the victims of horrendous levels of sustained sexual violence by the conquering powers, but the fate of their menfolk was playing out to its own drama. A huge percentage of Germany’s men had served in the armed forces and were either dead, wounded, missing, or imprisoned. Due to traditional recruitment policies of the German armed forces, many of the survivors of the officer corps were refugees from eastern Germany, from provinces lost to Poland or in the Soviet zone. Worsening matters, in August 1945 the Allied Control Council dissolved and declared illegal all German veterans’ organizations, including the armed forces. Most dramatically, the law banned all organization or association of veterans and revoked all their pensions, benefits, and rights, including from those who had not even fought in the war. At one fell swoop, this rendered all but destitute, millions of men and the families who depended upon them. Veterans were widely distrusted and vilified. However, despite formal injunctions against organizing themselves to claim their rights and honor, they quickly created informal networks and groupings. Von Vollmer’s factory and its attendant association—albeit aided and abetted by Markworth’s plotting—are a fictionalized example of how this could have been done.
The Allies did keep a close watch on veterans, as indeed they did on any group that could, it was felt, harbor Nazi sympathies or provide shelter and succor. One such group that never materialized, despite a high degree of propaganda and hysteria, were the “Werewolves,” which were supposed to have operated clandestinely within occupied Germany to resist the Allies. Another group that never existed was BOALT—the British Occupation Authority Liaison Taskforce—although something like it might have and maybe could have. The British and American armies had many Germans, or men of German ancestry, in their ranks, and many of them came back to Germany with the occupation. Given the real need to feel the pulse of German opinion about the occupation and the occupiers, a unit like BOALT would have found ample employment. The Brandenburgers did exist. An elite unit, similar in training and ethos to Britain’s Commandos or the SAS, the Brandenburgers were proficient in languages, making them a dangerous force and lethal infiltrators.
A last word on the military concerns the vast numbers of prisoners of war captured by the Allies. All four of the Allies used prisoners to some extent as forced labor, for example to bring in the harvest, for rubble clearance, or for postwar reconstruction. Most prisoners were vetted and released relatively quickly after the war ended, the vast majority by 1946, although the Soviets did keep many prisoners into the early 1950s. Given the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front between the competing ideologies, the Soviets implemented indoctrination programs with German prisoners and attempted to recruit some to their cause. These efforts had limited success, although several organizations were formed, such as the League of German Officers. By and large, these organizations had limited impact with most prisoners, who treated them as traitors. Paul Margraff, a German soldier captured at Stalingrad and Berlin’s chief of police after the war, was one such officer, and there were others whom the Soviets placed into positions of authority in, for example, the police force. Margraff unabashedly promulgated pro-Soviet policies, turned a blind eye to Red Army excesses, and ensured Berlin’s police towed the Soviet line.
—
With the German armed forces, indeed almost any organization remotely military in nature, rendered illegal, this left the police as the only remnant of the German state capable of exercising control and upholding the law. The police, however, were powerless to prevent crimes committed by the Allies. Furthermore, the police leadership across the country had been replaced with men picked by the Allies for their loyalty. In Berlin, this saw the Soviets replace the entire police force with “anti-Fascist” elements that often behaved as badly as, if not worse than, their Fascist forbears. Police officers were complicit in the harassment of non-Communist politicians and parties, and showed little cooperation with the Western Allies. Police command—the Presidium—was in Mitte in the Soviet Sector. Officers employed in the Presidium were compelled to live in the Soviet sector, and officers in the zones of the Western Allies were obliged to go to Mitte, where, it was suspected, they received instructions on how to behave.
Exasperated by Margraff’s behavior and the general attitude of Berlin’s police, the Western Allies eventually negotiated a thorough reform in October 1946, which, among other measures, decentralized control of Berlin’s police and introduced assistant chiefs of police for the police commanders in the four sectors. These assistants—one of whom was the Bruno Bliemeister who makes a brief appearance in The Divided City—were former policemen who had retired before the Nazis came to power or who had been forcibly removed by them. They were nominated by the Allies to keep an eye on police operations, but they could not overtly interfere in them. Rather, they ensured that inter-Allied policies were implemented and, at least in the three Western zones, diluted Soviet influence over the police as much as possible.
—
In writing this book, I would like to acknowledge the following works in particular:
Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1955, by Jay Lockenour (University of Nebraska Press, 2001)
Berlin 1945. World War II: Photos of the Aftermath, by Michael Brettin and Peter Kroh (Berlinica Publishing LLC, 2014)
The Long Road Home, by Ben Shephard (Vintage, 2011)
As well, I would like to acknowledge the assistance afforded by the National Archives at Kew, London.
—
As a human, I can only wish that we would treat one another better as a species. As a humanitarian worker, I know this sadly to be untrue, that since the end of World War II, the litany of man’s inhumanity to man has been a long and bloodied one.
The arc of Reinhardt’s story in and around the tumultuous times of World War II, from reawakening in The Man From Berlin to resistance in The Pale House to reconciliation in The Divided City has now come to an end. Although Reinhardt will not march again—his days as a marching man are over—he still has stories to tell, and those stories will be found among the tides of people displaced by the war, and within the international relief operation set up to assist them.