The Berliners and the Russians
The Berlin Airlift succeeded largely because of the
steadfastness of the Berliners. Their tenacious refusal to accept Russian rule was not
due to sympathy with the West but rather cruel personal experience with the Soviets
themselves. The political consequences of those experiences were far more significant than the Russians ever dreamed.
German hatred of the Soviets pre-dated the end of the war. There were the years of Nazi propaganda against Communism, and four bitter years of exceptionally vicious warfare on the Eastern Front which had consumed German lives by the Division. But the major problems began when Soviet troops crossed into Germany. Because they were soon expelled again, the German media had ample evidence of the atrocities committed and so the fear of the advancing Red Army was fed and intentionally magnified. Many sophisticated and educated Germans believed that Goebel’s propaganda machine was exaggerating Russian excesses wildly and that things couldn’t and wouldn’t be as bad as German media reports. In fact, they were worse.
In the final assault on Berlin, an estimated 100,000 civilians lost their lives. That was twice the number killed in all the air raids of the previous three years. But that was war. What profoundly and undisputedly altered fear into an inexorable and bitter hatred was the behaviour of the Soviet troops after they had achieved their victory.
It has been estimated that the Red Army raped as many as one million German women – that is the number of victims, not the number of rapes. Due to the high number of gang or multiple rapes, the number of rapes may well have exceeded two million. Gang rapes were particularly common in the early days. Rapes frequently occurred before the eyes of young children or aging parents. Ursula Koster, a mother of six year old twins and a seven month old boy was raped by four Soviet soldiers one night and the following morning, while nursing her infant, she was raped again by two more soldiers. Another Berliner reported how she had been raped “seven times in a row. Like animals.” Eighteen year old Inge Zaun was raped sixty times. Russian officers reported arriving in homes and finding only the limp and battered corpses of young girls draped over pieces of furniture – not shot, simply but literally raped to death. More mature women who resisted - and many who didn’t – were shot or had their throats slit. Thousand of others committed suicide – before or after the abuse.
Nor were these excesses only a short-lived phenomenon – a perverse kind of “victory celebration” lasting a few days and then ending in the restoration of order. On the contrary, they appear to have been a deliberate policy or at least so benevolently condoned at the highest levels of the Soviet military and political hierarchies that the excesses continued for months after the end of the war and even after the arrival of the Western Allies in the city. The American commandant of Berlin reported that during the first week of U.S. occupation “two hundred Soviet officers and men came into Kreuzberg, in the American sector, and began looting and raping in a large apartment house. Not even a jeepload of American MPs could get them to leave.”[i] One hospital in the American sector reported treating 250 rape cases in a single day. Note: that is only the reported cases in one hospital on one night after the arrival of the Americans.
In a city inhabited almost exclusively by women, the epidemic scale and brutality of the rapine committed by Soviet troops traumatized all those who survived this sexual reign of terror – whether they had personally been victims or only witnesses to the ravishment of others. Interviews with women resident in Berlin in 1945/1946 to this day call forth a raw and unrelenting revulsion toward all things Russian. As the historians Ann and John Tusa worded it: “The Red Army lost Berlin politically at the moment it captured it militarily.”[ii]
But if the orgy of rape was the most repulsive and emotionally devastating of the Soviet policies, it was by no means the only way in which the Soviet Union systematically repulsed and outraged the population. Their wild and indiscriminate vandalism and obsessive plundering also earned them a kind of hatred that is devoid of respect. The fact that Russian soldiers ignorant about the workings of electricity and plumbing carried away light-bulbs and toilet seats with the expectation of having light and flushing toilets wherever they took their trophies contributed to an image of the Russian “Ivan” as not only brutal but idiotic as well. The machine-gunning of the supplies stored in the International Red Cross warehouses, destroying invaluable medical supplies – many of which the Red Army itself lacked, branded the Russians as sheer barbarians. At Templehof, a civilian airfield never used for military air operations and so largely undamaged by Anglo-American air raids, the Soviet troops smashed the pumps and piping that kept the cellars dry and so flooded the complex in an act of senseless destruction of no use to anyone. Yet Soviet behaviour was best epitomized by an incident recorded by General Howley in which a car full of Soviet soldiers passed a young girl on her bicycle and noticed she was wearing a wrist watch. They stopped her and demanded the watch. The girl refused. The Soviets got out of the car and one of them shot the girl dead. Then they removed the watch, got back in their car and drove away. She was probably lucky not to have been gang raped before being shot and robbed; presumably the Soviets were in a hurry.
Historians – and many modern readers – are familiar with the depth of the Soviet regime’s contempt for its own people. Arguably, it was because Soviet soldiers had seen their own friends and family cut down casually and without greater cause that they could not conjure up any sympathy or even pity for their former enemies. War barbarizes men and total war barbarizes them totally. The individual Soviet soldier had on average been subjected to the demoralizing influences of brutal warfare far longer and under far more gruesome circumstances than his British, much less American, comrades. Perhaps it was impossible to infuse humanity into troops that had been fighting for so long – much less troops raised in a merciless, totalitarian regime that engaged in the wholesale slaughter of its own citizens and employed induced famine as a weapon against its own people. Whatever the reason, the behaviour of Soviet troops was not designed to win friends and influence people.
And nor was the Soviet reparations policy. As touched on earlier, Soviet economic policy called for Germany to pay reparations not from production or earned income but in raw materials, industrial goods and – most significantly - capital goods. It has been estimated that 85% of the industrial capacity of the Western sectors of Berlin was dismantled and transported to the East. No matter how justified Soviet reparation claims were, the means chosen to fulfil them were calculated to cause resentment because not only did Germans see their country being stripped of virtually everything that hadn’t been destroyed in the war, but it left them unemployed and so with no hope for the future. It is bad enough to see the fruits of your labour taken away from you, but when the very means of producing are taken away as well, the effect is doubly demoralising.
And yet again, that too might have been tolerable at some level if the Soviets hadn’t also started taking the workers too. At 3.30 in the morning on Oct. 22, 1946, for example, hundreds of skilled workers at a factory producing high frequency radio equipment and their families were rounded up, loaded onto trucks and deported to the Soviet Union. Skilled workers form a variety of other factories such as AEG-Kabelwerk and Askania were also subjected to the same treatment. In all ninety two trains carrying thousands of technicians and skilled workers were dragged involuntarily from their homes and sent to work in the Soviet Union. True, the Germans had done such things too, but then Nazi Germany didn’t claim that its slave labourers were the “ruling class” in a worker’s paradise.
And then there were the kidnappings. As soon as the Soviets arrived in Berlin, people started disappearing. The sight familiar from the days of the Gestapo of cars driving up, strong men jumping out and seizing someone, forcing them into the back of a car and disappearing – forever – continued. Unlike the rape, the looting and the reparations, the incidents of kidnapping rose as time went on. Colonel Howley estimated that there had been a total of 2,000 politically motivated kidnappings in Berlin since the arrival of American troops and more than half of them occurred in the first half of 1948.
Some dissents, the lucky ones, didn’t disappear entirely, they were simply sent to “re-education” centres. The Soviets were fortunate not to need to build facilities for their re-socialisation efforts. They found the former concentration camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen immanently suitable for their purposes. Between 1945 and 1950, no less than 200,000 people form the Russian Zone (and some captured from the Western Zones) were sent for “re-education” in these camps; one third of them died there.[iii]
Meanwhile another form of re-education was being exercised at the only major university in Berlin. Communist ideology was now a compulsory subject and all lectures had to be submitted to Party ideologues in advance to ensure conformity with the Party Line as dictated from Moscow. To ensure that alternative perspectives could not develop, propaganda broadcasts were piped into the cafeteria to inhibit discussion among students. And still the University was a hot-bed of “reactionary” thinking forcing the Soviet authorities to arrest 2,000 students in 1948 alone, 600 of which were found to be in such dire need of serious re-education that they had to be sent Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen.
Even if a Berliner could avoid having skills useful to the Soviets or having thoughts subversive to Communism, he/she still faced a degree of harassment and intimidation unknown in the West or under the Nazis. Namely, his/her freedom of movement was severely restricted by a variety of bureaucratic measures that made it necessary to ask permission for almost anything, and on top of that he/she was subjected to arbitrary search and the “confiscation” of “illegal” goods whenever he/she tried to move about the city or travel between Berlin and the surrounding countryside. It is hardly surprising that most Berliners viewed the “confiscations” as a continuation of the plundering of the early days of the Occupation.
It was humiliating for the Allies to have their trains and convoys stopped, but the Allies never had to live in fear of deportation or disappearing into a re-treaded Nazi concentration camp. The Western Allies were being harassed and humiliated with regard to their rights and prerogatives, Berliners were being threatened in their very existence. Thus while the American fretted whether the Berliners could be expected to suffer hardships for the sake of Western Allied rights, the Berliners were despairing that the Americans would ever grasp the fact that the Soviets were inherently untrustworthy, congenitally aggressive and fundamentally evil. It is notable that at no time leading up to the crisis did the free press in West Berlin perceive the growing crisis as one of Allied rights. For the Berliners the issue was always one of their own freedom.
Berliners had hoped and expected the Western Powers to put an end to Soviet offences from the day they arrived in the city; they had not. They had hoped that the Western Powers would restore the currency and the economy; they had not. They had hoped the Western Powers would defend democracy; they had not. After so many disappointments, the Berliner didn’t expect much of the West any more, and they had their complaints against their greed and licentious behaviour too, but they were still so very obviously the lesser of the two evils that Berliners were prepared to make a stand if only for the sake of dignity and without any hope of success. Asked by a cynical West German why Berlin was enduring the Blockade and if the West Berliners really thought they were going to be thanked for “fighting for freedom,” a Berliner retorted: “Do you expect to be thanked for breathing?” Baffled the West German admitted that of course he didn’t expect that. The Berliner then asked him why he bothered to breathe. It was as simple as that to Berliners. They did not expect the West to hold up and they did not believe that an Airlift could sustain them, but surrendering to the detested Soviets was not an option.
When the Airlift started, the Allies had little love for and only limited expectations with regard to the stamina and commitment of the Berliners, and the Berliners had even less love and lower expectations for the will-power and political insight of the Western Powers, but both felt that they had no choice. The Soviets had pushed them too far once too often. It became a case of on both parts of: Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.
[i] Frank Howley, Berlin Command, Putnam, 1950, 67-68.
[ii] Ann and John Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, Sarpedon, 1988, 24.
[iii] Tusa, 59.
NOTE: The content of this blog post is based on Helena P. Schrader. The Blockade Breakers. Pen & Sword, 2008
The Berlin Airlift is the subject of Bridge to Tomorrow, a trilogy of novels starting with Cold Peace, winner of Silver in the 2023 Readers' Favorites Book Awards.
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.
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