Backstory to the Berlin Airlift: Berlin Zero Hour
The Berlin which the Western Allies occupied after a long and costly war and considerable diplomatic squabbling with the Soviets was anything but the proud capital of a great, albeit defeated, nation. One of the German Communists who returned to Berlin with the Soviet Army in May 1945 described it as “a picture of Hell.” He found flaking ruins and starving people shambling about in tattered clothing, dazed German soldiers, drunk Red Army troops, long queues with buckets at pumps for water and felt that everyone he met looked “terribly tired, hungry, tense and demoralised.”[i]
This was not surprising. An estimated fifty thousand Berliners were dead among the ruins, many of them still unburied. The canals were chocked with debris and bodies. Shortly before surrendering, fanatical Nazis had ordered the city’s underground system flooded, and thousands, who had taken refuge there before the advancing Soviet tanks, troops and artillery fire, had been drowned. Their bodies only gradually worked their way into the canals and lakes.
Furthermore, Berlin’s water mains had been ruptured in 3,000 places during the fight for the city and only 23 of the city’s 84 sewage pumping stations were functioning.[ii] In consequence, the canals were filled not only with corpses and debris but with sewage as well, contributing further to growing health hazards in a city where only 9.300 hospital beds were available compared to a wartime capacity of 38,000. The water was unsafe to drink without boiling it first, but there was no electricity or gas with which to heat stoves and so boil the water. Coal and wood was also in short supply. So typhoid and dysentery were spreading, the latter killing an estimated 65 out of every 100 babies born.[iii]
Furthermore, one and a half million Berliners were homeless out of an estimated population of 3.3 million. In some boroughs of the city, those boroughs which had sustained the greatest bomb damage or those areas most fiercely contested in the final land battle for Berlin, the situation was even more acute. In central Schoenberg, for example, 45% of all housing was completely destroyed, 15% was heavily damaged, 35% partially damaged and only 5% still intact.[iv]
Transportation was also virtually at a standstill. Of the 150 bridges that had linked the various parts of the city across the rivers Spree and Havel and the canals of the city, 128 had been destroyed. Furthermore, there were fewer than forty buses and one hundred street cars still in operable condition. There was absolutely no petrol for either public or private vehicles.[v] Furthermore, three out of four of the city’s fire stations had been destroyed and of the 125,000 street lights that had once lit up the city, only 4,000 were still standing.
This situation at German surrender was the result of war damage both through Anglo-American bombing and Soviet house-to-house fighting, but in the two months that followed when the Soviets occupied the city alone these desperate conditions were aggravated by a Soviet policy of private and public theft. While the individual Soviet soldier was given a blank check to take whatever he could lay his hands upon and carry, the Soviet state set about systematically stealing anything that was not already destroyed. This policy was officially described as “reparations” but the reality was that vast amounts of equipment and industrial plant were dismantled and transported out of Germany, but very little of it was ever reassembled in the Soviet Union. In short, the Soviet policy of dismantling whatever remained of the German transportation and industrial capacity impoverished Germany without enriching the Soviet state or people. In consequence of Soviet “reparations,” 90% of Berlin’s steel industry, 85% of the optical and electrical industry, and 75% of the printing industry was removed by the USSR.[vi] Berlin’s telephone system, which before the war had serviced over 600,000 customers, was systematically taken apart until, by the time the Americans arrived, only 4,000 telephone connections remained.[vii]
One particularly significant casualty of the Soviet demolition policy was the only major power plant located in the Western Sectors of Berlin. By the time the Western Allies arrived in Berlin this vital power plant (but not those in the Eastern Sectors of the city) had been dismantled by the Soviets and its component parts had disappeared into the “East,” leaving the Western powers dependent upon electricity supplied by the still functioning power plants located in the Eastern Sectors of the City. Clearly, “reparations” for war damage could have been collected more easily from a power plant located in the East. The dismantling of the only power plant in the Western Sectors of Berlin was a targeted move designed to weaken the position of the Western powers in Berlin before they even arrived.
But such calculations were not noted at first. The first Western troops to arrive in Hitler’s capital were too stunned by the scale of the destruction to fully grasp the Soviet game. What they saw instead was that this shattered city was home not only to the decimated population of the city itself, but also to hoards of refugees displaced by the war. Although the figures for Berlin alone are not recorded, General Lucius Clay, the U.S. Military Governor in Germany, claimed that 4.5 million German “expellees” from the Sudetenland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland as well as 2.1. million refugees from other parts of Europe had swollen the population of the U.S. Occupied territories.[viii] A portion of these refugees, including former Nazi slave labourers and German refugees who had fled before the advancing Red Army, were stranded in dysfunctional Berlin simply because it had been a magnet and transportation hub until the last days of the war. When the city was surrounded by the Red Army and entire transportation network collapsed towards the end of the war, these refugees were trapped in the dying capital. Vast numbers of both “expellees” and “refugees” were now far too weak to continue their trek on foot.
Weakness was widespread because no one was getting enough to eat any more. The German system of provisioning the city had collapsed entirely in the last days of the war and so the Occupation Powers were responsible for supplying a city which had not been self-sustaining for generations. For the West this had been another surprise gift from the Soviets on their arrival in Berlin: the Red Army abruptly announced to the new Western Commandants that now that they were in Berlin “of course” they were entirely responsible for feeding the people in their respective Sectors – NOT from the Soviet Zone surrounding the city but from their own Zones, more than 100 miles away at best. In short, the Soviets dumped the provisioning of over 2 million people in the Western Sectors of Berlin upon the Western Commandants without making the slightest concession with regard to the means of transporting those supplies into the city from the West. But initially access was not the issue. The issue was simply finding enough food to prevent a catastrophe.
Even in peacetime, Germany as a whole had imported up to 30% of its food. During most of the war, Germany had drawn upon the agricultural resources of the countries it had conquered from Norway to Italy and from the Aquitaine to the Ukraine. Thus hunger was a new phenomenon for the Germans, but it was spreading rapidly. The newly liberated populations of Western and Eastern Europe had known hunger under the Nazis and now they claimed their own harvests. Meanwhile, extensive war damage and the slaughter of farm animals had reduced the productive capacity of what was left of Germany. Adding to the problem was the fact that roughly one third of Germany’s pre-1936 territory (and a larger portion of its agricultural capacity) had just been annexed by the Soviet Union/Poland. Given the fact that the remaining rump state had to support a population swollen with refugees, it was clear that a crisis was in the making. The Occupation Powers were forced to fix rations at between 950 and 1150 calories per day, or “only half the caloric content deemed essential by nutritional experts to support a working population and about one third of that available to the American people.”[ix]
This was the situation in Germany in the summer of 1945, a point in time which the Germans came to call “Zero Hour.” The complete and utter defeat of Nazi Germany, not just the unconditional surrender of Hitler’s Armed Forces, had been achieved. This was the moment when the victors came together to work out a blue-print for the post-war world.
[i] Tusa, p. 25.
[ii] Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany, p. 32
[iii] Michael D. Haydock, City Under Siege, p. 47, 68.
[iv] Clay, p. 32.
[v] Haydock, p. 6.
[vi] Office of the Military Government, U.S. Sector, Berlin, Four Year Report, 1949.
[vii] Haydock, p. 22.
[viii] Clay, p. 314-315.
[ix] Clay, p. 264.
*****
NOTE: The content of this blog post is based on Helena P. Schrader. The Blockade Breakers. Pen & Sword, 2008
The Berlin Airlift is also the subject of Bridge to Tomorrow, a trilogy of novels starting with Cold Peace.
Berlin 1948.
In the ruins of Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian brutality form an air ambulance company. But the West is on a collision course with Stalin’s aggression and Berlin is about to become a flashpoint. World War Three is only a misstep away.
View a video teaser at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTuE7m5InZM&t=5s
My novels about the RAF in WWII are intended as tributes to the men in the air and on the ground that made a victory against fascism in Europe possible.
they took the war to Hitler.
Their chances of survival were less than fifty percent.
Their average age was 21.
This is the story of just one bomber pilot, his crew and the woman he loved.
It is intended as a tribute to them all.
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MORAL FIBRE is the WINNER OF A HEMINGWAY AWARD 2022 and was a FINALIST for the BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD IN HISTORICAL FICTION.
"Where Eagles Never Flew" was the the winner of a Hemingway Award for 20th Century Wartime Fiction and a Maincrest Media Award for Military Fiction. Find out more at: https://crossseaspress.com/where-eagles-never-flew
For more information about all my aviation books visit: https://www.helenapschrader.com/aviation.html
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