Life After the Third Reich

The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

Paul Roland

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788881845
• eBook ISBN: 9781788880930
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

In 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker as the Third Reich collapsed and the Red Army swamped Berlin. But what was it like to live in Germany after World War II?This is the story of Germany after the Nazis, a time when two separate states rose from the ashes to face each other across the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, the people struggled to come to terms with both the physical and psychological impact of defeat, as well as guilt for the monstrous acts that had been committed under Hitler's regime.When Allied forces took over Germany, they were shocked at the scale of destruction. But how did they ensure that those guilty of crimes against humanity were punished, and where exactly did all the Nazis go after the war?

Chapter One
Collapse

April 1945

As Hitler’s thousand-year Reich crumbled, three million British and American troops and their allies converged on the heartland of National Socialism from the west and more than six and a half million Soviet troops descended on Berlin, the capital of Hitler’s empire, from the east. The Red Army were, in the main, merciless and unforgiving after losing more than 11 million men and having witnessed the brutality meted out to their people by the Germans. The SS had been particularly, but not exclusively, involved in this. A quarter of the population of Belorussia (modern-day Belarus) had perished in what Communist Russia would commemorate as ‘The Great Patriotic War’.

Now they were at the mouth of what the Soviet press called ‘the lair of the fascist beast’ and were encouraged to vent their anger on the population. Posters incited them with slogans: ‘Soldier, have you killed your German today?’ and ‘You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck.’ Krasnaya Zvezda, the official Soviet military newspaper, declared:

The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word ‘German’ is for us the worst imaginable curse … If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day.

The Russians had been the first to liberate the death camps of Eastern Europe where Slavs, Soviet prisoners and Hitler’s political opponents had starved and endured inhuman treatment, but as early as July 1944 Hitler’s death factories were common knowledge, following the discovery of Majdanek concentration camp outside Lublin.

In their haste to save their skins, the SS guards had ignored Himmler’s orders to demolish the gas chambers and the crematoria and scatter the mounds of ash and human bone fragments that testified to the extermination of countless victims. The scale of the enterprise had prevented the timely disposal of damning evidence – the guards had left behind hundreds of thousands of pairs of spectacles, shoes, suits, coats, dresses, suitcases and toys, all of which had belonged to those who had ended their journey at this accursed place. Majdanek was an immense warehouse where the personal items abandoned by those who passed through Sobibór, Treblinka and Belzec were taken to be sorted and transported back to Germany to clothe evacuees. Equally incriminating were the detailed records that had not been destroyed when the SS members abandoned the camp.

Two Russian soldiers manhandle a girl in the SBZ, which was the German zone under Soviet command, in 1945 or 1946.

Mixed response to camp reports

The Soviet propaganda machine made the most of these discoveries, providing an added incentive – if one were needed – for the Red Army to wreak their revenge on the Germans, military and civilians alike.

In November 1944, a full six months before the Red Army besieged Berlin, the magazine Znamya (Banner) published a highly emotive but chillingly accurate description of the killing process at Treblinka. Although the average Russian soldier probably didn’t care about the fate of the Jews, he would have recognized the names of the towns and cities where the victims had been rounded up and transported to the killing factory. And he would have known that among them were comrades from Warsaw, Bialystok, Siedlce, Lomza and Belorussia.

Himmler’s minions are now telling the story of their crimes – a story so unreal that it seems like the product of insanity and delirium … It was not without reason that Himmler began to panic in February 1943; it was not without reason that he flew to Treblinka and gave orders for the construction of the grill pits followed by the obliteration of all traces of the camp. It was not without reason – but it was to no avail. The defenders of Stalingrad have now reached Treblinka; from the Volga to the Vistula turned out to be no distance at all. And now the very earth of Treblinka refuses to be an accomplice to the crimes the monsters committed. It is casting up the bones and belongings of those who were murdered; it is casting up everything that Hitler’s people tried to bury within it ...

Not all of Stalin’s soldiers were peasants and brutes. There were artists, intellectuals, academics and professionals too and 800,000 women served in the Red Army, a quarter of whom were decorated for bravery. Two thousand of these served as snipers and such accounts of cruelty against Slavic women and children must have stirred their thirst for revenge.

By contrast, the British and American press and broadcasters were highly sceptical of such reports. Even when one of their own reporters submitted an eyewitness account of Majdanek, the BBC refused to broadcast it, believing that it was another example of Soviet propaganda. The New York Herald Tribune rejected the same report with the comment that it sounded ‘inconceivable’.

The vengeance to come

The Russian press knew what the Nazis were capable of, having uncovered the massacre of nearly 34,000 civilians at Babi Yar in Kiev in September 1941 and having seen the aftermath of numerous other atrocities as the Russian Army pushed the Germans back to the outskirts of Berlin. A month later, on 17 December 1944, Pravda accused all Germans of complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich.

For many years the Nazis brainwashed German youth. What were they conveying to the little fascists? A feeling of superiority. Now the world knows what racial or national arrogance means. If every nation decided that they are first in the world and therefore have the right to order others about, we will see new Majdaneks in the 20th century.

In the countries they captured, the Germans killed all the Jews: the elderly and nursing babies. Ask a captured German why did your compatriots annihilate six million innocent people? And he will say: ‘They are Jews. They are black (or red) haired. They have different blood.’ This began with vulgar jokes, with name-calling by hoodlums, with graffiti, and all this led to Majdanek, Babi Yar, Treblinka, to ditches filled with children’s corpses … People all over the world need to remember that nationalism is the road to Majdanek … fascism was born out of the greed and stupidity of some, and the perfidy and cowardice of others. If mankind wants to put an end to the bloody nightmare of these years, it must put an end to fascism … Fascism – a terrifying cancerous tumour … When Die Pommersche Zeitung dares to claim that the Germans crossed their borders as the most peaceful missionaries, it means that the fascists now have only one hope: the loss of memory … We must remember: this is our obligation to the dead heroes and to the children.

Expressing hatred for all Germans and vowing to avenge the sufferings of his people, one Russian soldier remarked: ‘Hitler robbed the whole of Europe … the Germans deserve the atrocities they unleashed.’ The Germans themselves sensed and dreaded what was to come. A common phrase was repeated all over the eastern regions as the Russians closed in: ‘If they do to us what we have done to them, God help us!’

German prosperity

Once across the German border, the Russian troops were infuriated to find the shops stocked with goods stolen from stores, farms and factories in the occupied territories. Lieutenant Boris Itenberg wrote to his wife: ‘How well these parasites lived. I saw ruined houses, abandoned furniture, dozens of other signs of an incredibly good life. They lived so well. Why did they need more?’

His resentment was echoed by infantry officer Dimitry Shchegolev: ‘The more we penetrate into Germany, the more we are disgusted by the plenty we find everywhere.’

In the West, the Americans witnessed similar scenes of prosperity, at least in the agricultural regions where even the farm animals were well fed. They passed by ‘rich’, well-equipped and well-managed farms tended by ‘strong and healthy’ farmers and their equally well-fed and well-nourished foreign workers. It was only when the Americans entered the larger towns and cities that they witnessed the destruction and sensed the ‘air of defeat’.

When they came upon ragged groups of slave workers wandering aimlessly in the countryside, they directed them to a US storehouse where they were issued with clothing and food. Eighteen-year-old Pole Bogdan Moszkowski recalled watching the reaction of his fellow refugees and former slave workers to seeing such plenty after so many years of privation. It was theirs for the asking.

In the stores many clothes remain. No one takes more than one set, but every one of them takes as much food as he can carry. They want to be surrounded with food – they do not want to part with it – they want to see it all the time.

City under siege

The fighting in both sectors was fierce now that the war was being fought on German soil and the Russians knew that they would probably bear the brunt of it when they reached the capital. Berlin was a citadel covering 300 square miles and it was fortified by defences 30 miles deep, so it would not fall without a prolonged and costly fight. All German citizens, male and female, young and old, were compelled to enlist in the Volkssturm (People’s Militia), if they were not already in uniform, and were then ordered to fight to the death for Führer and Fatherland. A further 100,000 Soviet soldiers would die taking the city and 350,000 would be grievously wounded.

The city’s three million inhabitants had been under siege for more than a year, first by incessant Allied air raids and now by massed artillery. They were demoralized by the unceasing bombardment, the disruption of gas and electricity and the scarcity of food, fresh water and essential supplies, added to which they lived like cornered rats in bombed-out buildings where insanitary conditions and the presence of decomposing bodies made life intolerable. On top of all of that, they existed in a constant state of fear, not only because of the shelling but also due to the Nazi fanatics who roamed the streets executing deserters and those who refused to fight.

In the face of imminent defeat and retribution, Berliners exhibited their characteristic gallows humour. They referred to their LSR air raid shelters (Luftschutzraum) as an abbreviation for Lernt schnell Russisch (Learn Russian Quickly), while graffiti appeared on shrapnel-pitted walls urging Berlin’s citizens to ‘Enjoy the war, peace will be terrible’.

Division of Berlin

The fate of Berlin had been decided at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, when Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had called for Germany’s unconditional surrender, the demilitarization of its armed forces and the division of the capital. The Big Three had also redrawn the map of post-war Europe, which saw Poland coming under Soviet rule, despite the fact that the Western Allies had initially gone to war to ensure its sovereignty. But Stalin reminded them that Poland had provided an invasion route to Russia on three previous occasions and he could not risk this happening again.

The plan to divide a defeated Germany into four military zones was only intended to be a temporary measure, to enable the orderly administration of the country and its capital. Although the Soviets could have refused to share Berlin with their allies, as they did with Poland, they needed their cooperation to secure 20 billion dollars in reparations. However, such a sum was more than a rejuvenated Germany could ever hope to pay.

The Soviets were against borrowing from a capitalist democracy on principle and the American corporations would have demanded the right to set up subsidiaries in the USSR, so the Russians had to resort to stripping Germany and Eastern Europe of its plant and machinery and other assets to recover their losses. Stalin’s only concession was to agree to hold elections in the Soviet zone of post-war Germany, but only on the understanding that the result would be to endorse the Communist administration.

Berlin left to the Soviets

The big question was what to do with a defeated Germany and how to ensure that it did not become belligerent in the future. As Berlin was the symbolic heart of the Nazi state and a key objective, its capture became a priority. Whoever occupied the greater part of Berlin when Germany surrendered would control the city and be in the strongest position when it came to negotiating the partition of the country.

Unfortunately, while Stalin could dictate military strategy and order his generals to direct all their forces to the capital, the Allied commanders had to contend with politicians who had conflicting requirements and priorities.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower was within 200 miles (320 km) of Berlin in the spring of 1945 when both US General Patton and British General Montgomery urged him to authorize their forces to take the capital, but Eisenhower declined, believing it to be ‘not worth the trouble’. Instead, he ordered the British and American troops under his command to encircle the Ruhr valley to seize the core of German industry.

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Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Collapse
• Chapter Two: Justice and Retribution
• Chapter Three: Denazification
• Chapter Four: Rebuilding and Regeneration
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright