The Berliners and the Western Powers
The steadfastness of the Berliners themselves was as important to the success of the Berlin Airlift as the astonishing logistical accomplishments of the Allied Air Forces. Yet in June 1948 when the Soviet blockade began, the relationship between the Berliners and the Western Occupation Powers was anything but harmonious.
There were a number of reasons for the tensions between the civilian population and Western Powers, not the least of which was the legacy of the war itself. It was only a little more than three years since the last Allied air raid on the city. The heavy bombing campaign against Berlin had started after the Casablanca Conference in response to Stalin’s demand for a Second Front – which the Western Allies were not yet ready to open. Instead, starting on June 10, 1943 the Royal Air Force opened an intensive night bombing campaign directed against the German capital. From early 1944 until the end of the war, the USAAF complimented this campaign with daylight raids. In total over 350 air raids were carried out against Berlin and roughly 75,000 tons of explosives were dropped on the city, killing an estimated 50,000 people.
By no means were the wounds left by that bombing healed at the start of the Airlift. The physical scars still had the power to shock airlift pilots. “Nothing I had read, heard or seen, prepared me for the desolate, ravaged sight below,” wrote one airlift pilot.[i] “The gaunt, broken outlines of once majestic buildings struggling toward the sky, supported by piles of rubble at their base, irregularly stretched from one end of the city to the other – a mottled mass of total destruction.”[ii] Flying into Berlin for the first time, the engineer of an airlift C-54 asked in disbelief: “Where in the world do two million people live?”[iii] When they investigated that, they were no less shocked and an RAF airman remembers visiting a German family who:
…were living in a partly demolished block of flats damaged during the war. The whole family were living in one room, eight of them, grandfather, grandmother, father, mother and four children. They cooked on an oil stove which also provided the heating. The lighting was by oil lamp, plus two beds and a wash basin, all crammed into the one room. Their only luxury appeared to be a radio set, of which the father was extremely proud and showed us that he could tune into English stations.[iv]
Less visible than the physical scars were the psychological scars – scars which the Soviets subtly but persistently sought to re-open and aggravate. Right up until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, plaques throughout East Berlin marked the places where historical and architectural monuments had been “destroyed in Anglo-American terror raids.” In East Germany history books, the Red Army had “liberated” Germany after the “Anglo-American air forces” had destroyed its cultural treasures and countless innocent (in as much as they were working class) civilians.
At least one RAF airman remembered being advised not to wear RAF uniform when off duty because of the hostility it aroused in the civilian population. Another RAF pilot remembers walking into the local pub in uniform and bringing all conversation to an instant halt; the German patrons then pointedly walked out rather than drinking at the same bar as he and his crew.
But if the Germans found it difficult to forgive and forget the bombing, the Western Allies were equally unable to forgive and forget the atrocities committed by the Germans. The liberation of the Concentration Camps by both British and American forces in the closing months of the war had for the first time exposed the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime. As one member of the German Resistance pointedly out forcefully, all subsequent generations have been raised in knowledge of the holocaust – and Stalin’s atrocities, and Pol Pot’s and the actions of the Lord’s Resistance Army etc. etc. etc.[v] But ordinary British and American soldiers stumbling upon Hitler’s Concentration Camps in the spring of 1945 were utterly unprepared for what they found. The shock produced a revulsion greater than cynical modern observers experience at the revelation of new crimes. Furthermore, modern media made the images available to those who had not personally been present. The images of Dachau and Bergen Belsen haunted the Allied soldiers in Occupation of German, and made it difficult in the early years to view the Germans as normal humans.
This situation was aggravated by the fact that many early occupiers in Germany and Berlin were offended to discover that the Germans did not appear to have any sense of guilt. Clay, generously, suggests that the Germans had been kept in ignorance of the crimes committed in their name and therefore stressed the importance of the Nuremberg Trials in educating the Germans about their guilt. Other observers were less kind, finding the Germans politically naïve and dim-witted. The Germans were viewed by many Americans and British as incapable of thinking for themselves and easily manipulated. One American officer felt that Germans had so complacently accepted their racial superiority that they “were confused and bitter about their humiliating defeat and hadn’t begun to sort out fact from fiction.”[vi] Viewing the Germans collectively as thick-headed criminals was clearly not the best basis for building a relationship of trust and mutual respect.
The Germans on the other hand were deeply offended by the fact that the Allies, particularly the Americans, were indiscriminate, and treated all Germans as equally guilty. They found it frustrating that the Americans appeared incapable of comprehending the variety of factors which had led to Hitler’s rise to power or the complex nature of totalitarian society which mixed incentives with terror and extracted compromises even from bitter opponents. Many Germans felt that it was the Americans, who were politically naïve, lacking in sophistication, subtlety and depth.
Admittedly, this frustration and sense of misunderstanding did not extend to the same degree to the French and British. The French-German relationship was characterised more by antipathy bordering on hatred on the one hand and contempt on the other. The British-German relationship in contrast was one of wary respect. Britain and Germany were the only two adversaries who had fought from start to finish of the long war. The British knew just how hard it had been to defeat the Germans, and Germans respected British tenacity and conceded that they had with sacrifice and persistence won the right to be a victorious power.
In the first years of occupation these attitudes lead to a curious situation in which the Americans and Russians seemed to have a greater affinity for one another at the personal rather than governmental level than the Americans and the British. An intelligence officer described the situation as follows:
We Americans were drawn like magnets toward the Russian troops…we liked the Russians most of the occupying forces. Their country had exercised unexpected and decisive military power, and in their willingness to try anything, they more closely resembled Americans than the gentlemanly French and British. No French or British officer would ever help repair a vehicle. Russians were different, Russian officers would pitch in and act like other ranks. They laughed a lot, were jolly, and responded to Americans with great curiosity.[vii]
On the other hand, as an RAF pilot reported candidly, the British often felt closer to the Germans than the Americans. He pointed out that both Britain and Germany were bankrupt, and that:
Brits could not afford to keep up with Americans, who found us stand-offish as a result. We still had rationing. The British diet was also being kept down by the London government to what the civilians were getting at home, and when U.S. crews landed at UK controlled airfields there were sometimes near riots. Our relationship was closer with the Germans actually – we’d both been bombed![viii]
Yet by the time the Airlift started the salient feature of Berlin-Western Powers relations was a profound disillusionment with the Western Allies on the part of the Berliners. Some of the disappointment was caused by the unsavoury behaviour of the Allied soldiers – particularly the American passion for the Black Market. Americans all over the world love a flea market – and a bargain. They also love to think of themselves as extremely clever traders and businessmen. Given the fact that American GIs received the highest salaries and free allocations of the unofficial currencies (cigarettes and chocolate), it was inevitable that even the simplest soldier became a self-proclaimed “master” of the black market. It was rare that the GIs understood the implications of their actions for the Berliners. Decades later, an American officer’s wife complained that her husband had not let her buy all the wonderful things that were being offered for sale at bargain prices. She insisted, “after all, people needed the money for food; I would have been doing them a favour.” Her husband replied: “If they were hungry than you should have given them food – not buy their treasures for a pittance.”[ix] But her husband was an exceptional man.
Nor were the British inherently more virtuous – they simply had fewer of the coveted goods to trade. According to one veteran of the Airlift with nearly 150 Airlift sorties in his log-book, “all” the Airlift pilots traded on the Black Market, despite the limited opportunities and the fact that it was heavily penalized. Being illegal only ensured that all dealings were conducted “out of sight – usually in the aircraft – to avoid detection.” The rationalization, like that of the American officer’s wife, was simplistic: “What harm was there? All we were doing was taking a little more food into Berlin in exchange for souvenirs. The food was in the shape of packets of cocoa and the souvenirs I favoured were beer steins.”[x]
In short, blithe exploitation of the situation by Western military personnel was the rule more than the exception and the papers were filled with scandals involving even relatively high ranking officers who enriched themselves with stolen works of art and other valuables. The papers also recorded cases of rape, murder, assault and drug dealing by members of the Western Occupation forces. A year after the end of the war, the rates of venereal disease in the U.S. Army in Germany was running at nearly one in every three soldiers, while “assaults on women by American soldiers were so frequent that American women attached to the occupation took to wearing armbands to identify themselves as Americans to prevent being harassed.”[xi]
One young Berliner summarised the feelings of his countrymen as follows:
Actually I didn’t have a very good opinion of the American soldiers. After they marched into the city in July 1945 we set great store by them. But then came the first instances of offences and theft against civilians… and we lost our faith.[xii]
Some of the disappointment was also economic. Rations continued to be inadequately low, unemployment unacceptably high. Reconstruction was not taking place in any significant degree or at a noticeable rate, and it was clear to virtually everyone that there could be no real economic recovery until there was a stable currency. But the West again and again failed to take the necessary measures. German politicians started to see this as at best incompetence and at worse policy. In a speech before the Party Congress of the CSU, the leading economic expert of the fledgling conservative party raged:
Today we could almost say that 1945 was a Golden Age. Everyone in the world knows that it is impossible to live on 1,500 calories a day… Everyone knows that we now, three years after end of the war, are sliding into famine…They have sent us corn and chicken feed. And nothing is given freely. We have to pay for everything in dollars earned with German labour and we’re supposed to be thankful for it! It is time for German politicians to stop saying ‘thank you!’[xiii]
Nor did German politicians find much to like in the initial “road map” put forward by the Allies in June 1948 for the return to sovereignty. The Germans felt they were being given very little by way of self-determination because far too much was already “dictated” to them. They were directed, for example, to set up a two-chamber legislature and to establish a federal system of government. Worse still, the Western Allies insisted that there would still be an “Occupation Statute” and that certain powers would be reserved to the Occupiers. In short, the Germans felt they were not being offered independence or sovereignty at all.
But the greatest disillusionment of all had to do with the perception that the West had failed to stand up to the Soviet Union. In part this attitude stemmed from the old notion that the West and particularly Britain was the “natural ally” of Germany. Many Germans did not understand why the Western Allies hadn’t made common cause with them against the “real” enemy, the Soviet Union and Communism at the end of the War. But even those who accepted their own defeat and guilt, still saw the West, particularly America, as being weak and indecisive in the power struggle that was obviously unfolding. One member of the Berlin City Council summarised it: “Russia acts. The Governors horse-trade. The Western Powers retreat and sell us down the river.”[xiv]
Western weakness was seen in the fact that the Western Powers never fully insisted on their own rights. For example, they left the Soviets in control of the radio station although it was located in the British sector, and then allowed the Soviets to spew forth anti-Western propaganda from that radio station 22 hours out of every 24. Weakness was also perceived in the fact that the West appeared to make no protest and take no action against the increasing number of kidnappings – many of which were carried out by the Communist controlled police. In the eyes of most Berliners, Western spinelessness was further demonstrated by the fact that the West allowed the Soviets to stop the elected Mayor of Berlin, Ernst Reuter, from taking office.
When the Soviets started turning up the pressure on the access roads, targeting particularly German civilians travelling on Allied trains, the fact that the British governor decided to stop taking German civilians on British trains altogether looked to Germans like a complete sell out. These increasing signs of “craven submission” to Soviet demands caused the Berliners to lose all faith in the Western Powers. A public opinion poll taken in January 1948 showed that the Berliners increasingly believed the Western Allies would pull out of Berlin. The most optimistic of them thought that the Allies would not go willingly, they might resist or protest – but only in a language that was too “lily-livered” to impress the Soviets or force them to any concessions.
[i] Gail Halvorsen, The Berlin Candy Bomber, Horizon, 1990, 54.
[ii] Halvorsen, p. 54.
[iii] Halvorsen, p. 54.
[iv] Geoffrey W. Smith, “The Berlin Airlift 1948/49: Recollections of Berlin and RAF Gatow,” Essay provided to the author by S/L Frank Stillwell in his capacity as Secretary of the British Berlin Airlift Association.
[v] Axel Frhr. v.d. Bussche, in personal interview with the author.
[vi] Richard Cutler, Counter Spy, Brassy, 2004, 69.
[vii] Culter, 80.
[viii] Bob Needham, RAF airlift pilot, letter to the author, Sept. 28, 2006.
[ix] An retired U.S. Army officer and his wife in private conversation with the author, 1983.
[x] Captain Roy Day, email to the author, Sept. 10, 2005.
[xi] Haydock, City under Siege, Brasseys, 1999, 105.
[xii] Erhard Cielewicz, letter to the author, Oct. 18, 2005.
[xiii] Dr. Johannes Semmler, speaking at the CSU Party Congress, Jan. 4, 1948.
[xiv] “Rußland handelt, die Gouverneure kuhhandel. Die Westmächte weichen zurück und verhandeln us.“ Keiderling, 196.
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.
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