Boys from the Hitler Youth strolled through the audience with wicker baskets loaded with cyanide capsules, handing them around as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra took a bow after a final concert for the Nazi dictatorship.
Senior party leaders, relatives, and friends in Berlin’s Beethoven Salle had listened to Wagner’s Gotterdammerung’s last aria, The Twilight Of The Gods, on April 12, 1945, knowing that it was also the twilight of Hitler’s dictatorship.
The Red Army was advancing on Berlin, and the city was filled with anxiety. Russia’s army was known for its harshness back then, as it is now. Who could blame people who took those tablets in search of an easy way out?
The police in Berlin ignored the cyanide trade; a quiet request to a friendly pharmacist may result in a little glass phial with a cork.
According to urban legend, cyanide was painless, with a bitter almond flavor on the tongue leading to a peaceful, non-violent death. Those that choose to take it found the reality to be a nightmare.
There was a severe suffocation sensation as the toxins reached the stomach. The face and skin would become a dark, mottled crimson, followed by agonizing heart failure.
The entire procedure may take two to five minutes, although it must have seemed like a lifetime at the time.
Despite this, many people opted to end their lives in this manner, some because of Nazi propaganda that lauded self-sacrifice and claimed there was no dignity in surrender, and others because of tiredness and terror.
Any time of Berlin’s chaotic history makes for a gripping narrative, but none feels more tragic than the closing weeks of spring 1945, when the Red Army threatened to raze the city, especially with the Russians preparing to destroy Ukraine.
Sinclair McKay’s new book Berlin, based on personal stories collected by the Zeitzeugenbörse — a new bank of evidence founded by German scholars — allows us to hear the voices of regular Berliners for the first time.
For years after the city’s collapse, survivors were hesitant to talk freely about what they had gone through: in the aftermath of Nazi crimes, it was taboo to indicate they were also victims of Hitler’s war.
The novel redresses the balance by providing a vivid, sad, and horrifying portrait of a metropolis looking into the void.
Most Berliners were living underground by the beginning of April 1945, in basements or U-Bahn stations, only surfacing to join food lines. Many people were forced to consume dandelions and stinging nettles as a last resort.
Truckloads of migrants streamed in from the east, fleeing the Red Army. ‘Clear out, the Russians will rape you, beat your brains out,’ actress Hildegard Knef, who became worldwide famous after the war, remembers one lady yelling as she stood in line. My spouse was crucified and fastened to a door: go out!’
Approximately 100,000 civilians are thought to be scattered throughout the city, buried and unburied, some victims of months of bombing, others died by their own hands.
Berlin has a stench of decay.
Death was so prevalent that the corpse of a lady beside the Spree drew just a fleeting notice from passers-by. Her possessions were on a bench, and she had apparently taken the poison while sitting near to her purse. She had dropped hopelessly to the ground as the effects of the drug began to take effect.
A handful of inhabitants in neighborhoods whose once-smart apartment towers had been blasted apart by Soviet shelling grabbed what left of their tattered sheets, fastened them to doors and window frames, and hung themselves, their bodies dangling over the streets below.
In his bunker, Hitler aimed a pistol towards his own head. With her feet curled behind her on the sofa, his lover Eva Braun shattered an ampoule of poison. Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister, tragically murdered not just herself but also her six children.
Children were sacrificed on the streets for the city’s defense. Dorothea von Schwanenfleugel recalled seeing a youngster, little and frail, no older than 12, sitting in a trench behind an anti-tank grenade and being surprised to see tears streaming down his cheeks. She inquired softly as to what he was up to.
He explained that he was given orders to wait until a Soviet tank came into view, then grab the grenade, go underneath the tank, and detonate it. He’d been convinced — or compelled — to commit suicide.
She realized it would be pointless to attack since Russian soldiers would shoot him dead before he could reach the tank. But she refrained from following her mother’s advice and taking the kid home to conceal him.
If the SS found out he had abandoned his station, he would join the ranks of the countless victims swinging dead from lampposts. If she abducts him and he is apprehended, she and her children will be killed as well.
She went away after giving him some food. The youngster vanished the next day.
Today, we are witnessing the atrocities of war in Ukraine in real time. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are claimed to have been transferred from the Donbass to Russian ‘filtration camps.’
A audio of a Russian soldier speaking to his mother revealed horrific details of the tortures done on Ukrainian detainees, including slashing and pulling the flesh off a victim’s fingers like petals on a flower.
Ukrainian people who fled their homes to avoid shelling have returned to discover their homes plundered for items such as perfumes, jewelry, alcohol, and money.
So it was in 1945: Russia’s conscripts were recruited from some of the country’s poorest and most backward districts, and they couldn’t believe the ‘luxury’ enjoyed by the German populace compared to their own privations.
In one occasion, Red Army troopers are said to have washed potatoes in a latrine. They had no idea what a flushing toilet was, so when they lifted the chain and the potatoes vanished, they accused the renters of ‘sabotage.’
Berliners themselves resorted to thieving to prevent Russians from obtaining both luxury and basic necessities. Hunger had stripped them of their inhibitions.
The widespread use of sexual assault as a terror tactic is one of the most troubling features of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. This, too, is a representation of Berlin in 1945.
25 girls and women, aged 14 to 24, were held in a basement and systematically raped by Russian soldiers in Bucha, a town north of Kyiv. Gang rapes, sexual attacks at gunpoint, and rapes in front of minors have all been reported by investigators in Ukraine.
Women in Berlin were also fearful of what might happen when the Russians came.
Heidi Koch, an adolescent member of the League of German Girls who was assisting in the construction of rubble walls to keep the Russians away, stated an SS member had emphasized the significance of the task by yelling at her, ‘Do you realize what will happen if the Russians come here?’
Do you comprehend that they’ll probably f*** you and shoot you?’
‘The old men and children will be slaughtered,’ the Fuhrer said in a broadcast. Women and maidens will be reduced to the status of harlots in the barracks.
The remainder will be sent to Siberia.’ Faced with such horror, Hildegard Knef, who had recently been signed to a big studio, developed a solution that would impress most screenwriters: she disguised herself as a male soldier to avoid the Red Army’s sexual attentions.
Knef was a towering, statuesque figure. She could appear and move like a man with a greatcoat, sweater, pants, and cap, but she went one step farther and joined the Volkstürm, a defense group made up of SS members and adolescent boys.
She was given ammunition and a target test at the organization’s headquarters before being directed to the basement, where she spent the next few hours listening to the ceaseless, distant artillery alongside a ‘pimply’ 15-year-old boy, armed and terrified, ready to pull the trigger, and an old soldier who had fought at Stalingrad.
Knef was sent to the city’s south-west outskirts, where she took refuge among the rubble of residential structures during artillery attacks.
The explosions were one thing; the psychological impact of the rocket launchers’ shrieking sounds (dubbed “Stalin’s Organs”) was quite another.
The noise, a piercing sound that pierced into the primordial areas of the brain, had been engineered to make rational thought impossible.
Knef later wrote, “The trembling starts in the feet, the shivering, the shaking, crawls up my body, gets hold of my teeth till they rattle, till my face bangs against the stones.”
The street engagements fought by tiny platoons of rag-tag Volkstürm fighters slowed the movement of Soviet vehicles for a time, but the tanks eventually arrived.
Knef heard ‘dreadful, heart-rending cries, high, thin, piercing’ while hiding in a railway shed on a wet evening. She recognized it: Russians had broken into a residence and’started on the women.’
Even in wartime, everyone understood that rape was illegal, yet the Russians faced no major consequences. ‘Our patrols now stroll through Berlin, and German ladies stare in their eyes invitingly, eager to commence the payment of “reparations” at immediately,’ said Russian author Leonid Leonov.
This terrifying mindset made rape a type of justice in and of itself, as if the women of Berlin were obligated to atone for the murders committed by Nazi soldiers in the east. Perhaps this is why some Soviet troops were unconcerned with the heinousness of public rape: one young woman was molested on the counter in full view of the street outside a grocery store.
To make themselves seem elderly and repulsive, young ladies smeared ash in their hair and padded out their garments in desperation.
There were an estimated 1.4 million women in Berlin in April 1945; the exact number of women raped is unknown, although estimates range from half a million to a million.
However, the incidents told in McKay’s book are frequently more delicate and intricate than this terrifying statistic suggests:
Marie Jalowicz-Simon, a Jewish refugee, embraced the first Soviet soldier she saw, happy to have escaped the Nazis: he seemed ‘quite astonished,’ she recounted. Nothing unusual occurred, but a few days later, ‘Soviet troops went on a rampage through the houses, rapping ladies.’ Of course, I was one of them.
‘I stayed in the attic that night, when I was visited by Ivan Dedoborez, a tough, friendly figure.’ It didn’t bother me too much.
‘After that, he scribbled a message and hung it on my door.’ It stated that this was his fiancée in the room, and that everyone else should leave her alone. In fact, no one bothered me after that.’
Frau Simon was resigned to the circumstance, but she also acknowledged the pain of a neighbor: her chamber was filled with ‘hysterical screaming and shouting.’
In other, more traumatic incidents, women bargained with troops in cellars in order to save younger siblings; other victims were forced into rooms where groups of men were waiting; and others were simply slain — even slaughtered — after the rape.
For some, sex was only a way of survival. Marta, a journalist who had been raped, was determined to prevent it from occurring again. She wrote, ‘I need a wolf who will keep the wolves away from me.’ ‘I’d like to be an officer at the highest level possible, Kommandant, General, whatever I can attain.’ She met such a man, and he offered her and her family safety, as well as small comforts like wax candles and booze.
Mechtild Evers, an office worker, snuck into the business safe and stole three months’ wages as the Russians closed in. She traveled to Stralsund, a port 100 miles north of Berlin, where her military husband was stationed, and then to Hiddensee, a tiny island popular with middle-class vacationers prior to WWII.
She ultimately made it to Stralsund as a lone lady on a hazardous route, where she was temporarily – and joyously — reunited with her husband. She then went alone to Hiddensee, but the Soviets quickly overran the entire region.
Her spouse was apprehended and imprisoned in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. On the mainland, Evers worked at a railway freight depot and subsequently on a rural farm with a group of other women. Some of their guards were released forced laborers – men who had been captured by the Germans in Poland, much to her distress.
A young lady was kidnapped and dragged to a ditch on the flat, featureless meadows, where she fought back ferociously. There was a gunshot. Evers and the other ladies were obliged to continue digging beets despite their pain and fear.
When night fell, they were led to a barn and confined inside. All of the ladies were raped, some of them many times, including Evers.
But, like Hildegard Knef, she survived the war.
The joyous, floodlit festivities of VE Day were held in Britain on May 8, 1945. It signaled the return of refugees from the countryside to the city in Berlin.
Evers was back on the streets, surviving on the goodwill of “those in striped concentration camp garb or Russian soldiers’ uniforms, whose souls the war had not been able to kill, who shared their single piece of bread with me.”
Knef had been imprisoned for a short time before revealing her actual identity and being released. She hadn’t washed in ‘three months,’ and her clothing were crawling with lice when she travelled back to Berlin on unpaved roads.
If someone had told these women that the authorities would restore parts of the city’s cinemas, theaters, and music halls within a month, they would have laughed, but such is Berlin’s tenacity, it occurred.
Knef joined a theatre ensemble in Berlin’s newly formed American district and began acting everything from light revues to Shakespeare, all while suffering from severe stomach aches.
For a few while, the players and spectators could forget about the awful catastrophe that had reduced their city to its knees. Berlin’s problems, however, were far from done.
As the war gave place to a standoff between the Soviets and the West, a new drama was about to begin: the split of the city, which would span more than 40 years.