Berlin at War (27 page)

a choice of new flats elsewhere, and chose one in the quiet neighbour-

hood of Friedenau, a couple of kilometres to the south.45

Yet, in many cases, it was at this point that the building plans collided

with cold realities. Though Speer promised to house all the 200,000

or so displaced Berliners, in reality he was hardly in a position to do

so, as the Berlin housing market was already seriously under-supplied

and he could not build new properties at anything near the necessary

speed. This situation, coupled with the Berlin housing stock already

lost to RAF raids, led to a genuine housing crisis in the German capital,

a crisis that would have profound ramifications.

As perhaps is natural in a crisis – and especially so in a dictatorship

– the solutions to problems are often found with society’s weakest

members. In Berlin in 1941 the answer to the housing crisis was sought

in a stepping up of the official persecution directed towards the city’s

Jews: if there was insufficient housing stock to accommodate those

relocated as well as those bombed out, then the Jews would be forced

to make way.

Berlin’s Jews – like those elsewhere in the German Reich – had already

been subjected to growing persecution. By the outbreak of war, they

were effectively isolated from everyday German life, banned from most

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berlin at war

public places and facing severe restrictions on their movement and

employment. But events would soon take an even more ominous turn.

In fact, the idea of forcibly evicting Berlin’s Jews dated back to

September 1938, a full year before the outbreak of the war. At that

time, Speer suggested that the capital’s Jewish community should be

moved into smaller properties, thereby freeing up larger ones for the

use of those Aryan Berliners displaced by the ongoing demolition

works.46 Speer’s idea was at least partially incorporated into the revised

rental law of April 1939, which decreed that Jewish tenants could be

legally evicted if it could be demonstrated that replacement housing

was available elsewhere. This decree opened the way for a series of

piecemeal evictions of Jews from those areas that Speer had earmarked

for his building projects. In 1940, one thousand Jews were removed

from the area to the south of the Tiergarten, which was required for

the construction of new Danish, Swiss and Spanish embassies.47 The

following summer, a further five thousand Jewish properties were

ordered to be cleared.

In time, the rules regarding Jewish housing were tightened still

further.48 In 1941 it was decreed that all vacant properties in Berlin

were to be registered with Speer’s office, which would then decide

on whether, and to whom, they could be re-let. With this move, all

remaining rights of Jewish tenants were suspended, and it became

possible for the authorities, in effect, to decide where to house Jews.49

This resulted in the establishment of so-called
Judenhäuser
– ‘Jew houses’

– often dilapidated blocks in insalubrious areas, where large numbers

of Jews would now be concentrated, subletting individual rooms and

sharing the meagre facilities. As if to make matters worse, homeless

Jews now also had to be taken in by existing Jewish households.

Life in the
Judenhäuser
was difficult. Overcrowding was endemic,

with families often living in a single room, sharing bathrooms and

kitchens and enduring the inevitable conflicts. Inge Deutschkron

described some of the everyday problems in her ‘Jew house’, on

Bamberger Strasse in Schöneberg:

Eleven people lived there, in 5½ rooms, according to the rules; one room

for every 2 Jews. In the flat, there was only one bathroom and one

kitchen. The mornings there were terrible. Everyone wanted to get to

work on time, as lateness could be taken as grounds for deportation.

brutality made stone

115

To do more than was required appeared to promise security, or relative

security at least. Anyone who dared to spend a long time on the toilet,

would be driven out with wild banging on the door or hysterical

screaming. An attempt to introduce any form of order was doomed

by the irregularity of the shifts. Factions were formed and became

irreconcilable. Those who returned home exhausted, from the hard

labour that had been allocated to them, and found the kitchen occupied,

would scream at the lucky ones who had got there first.50

Anna Samuel would have recognised such hardships at once. Her new

flat in a
Judenhaus
in Köpenick was dismal. ‘It’s difficult’, she wrote to a friend, ‘no running water in the room, only in the hallway, [where] there

is always a hubbub.’ Though the sixty-eight-year-old pensioner tried to

make the best of it, she seemed to be thwarted at every turn. ‘How will

I create order’, she worried, ‘out of this chaos, when . . . every kitchen

amenity is missing . . . Where will I wash something? There is an elec-

tric hot plate in the hallway – but it is always in use . . . To get to the

shower, I have to get up between 5 and 6. Then I go back to bed.’51

Many
Judenhäuser
were worse still. One of them consisted of a

block of properties bordering Katzlerstrasse and Grossgorschenstrasse,

close to the railway in Schöneberg. Though it had been earmarked

for demolition, as it lay in the path of the proposed North-South Axis,

it was instead designated as a ‘Jew House’ in 1940. It would become

home to 220 Jewish families.52

Though the raft of legislation had stopped short of a blanket evic-

tion of Jewish residents, Jews were now being corralled into what was

in effect, if not in name, a ghetto. By the autumn of 1941, over two

thousand Berlin Jews had already committed suicide. Perhaps they had

simply had enough of the petty persecution and harassment; perhaps

they had suspected that worse was to come. Those they left behind

would soon have their darkest fears confirmed. That October, the first

transports left the capital, carrying some four thousand Berlin Jews

bound for the ghetto at Lódz.53

It is sometimes suggested that any analysis of Albert Speer’s plans for

the rebuilding of Berlin should be restricted to the architectural sphere.

Just because the Nazi regime was evil, some have argued, it does not

necessarily mean that its architectural output must be damned in turn.

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berlin at war

Nazi architecture, some say, should be assessed solely on its architec-

tural merits and demerits: its proportions, its materials, its capitals and

its pedestals. Ancient Rome was built on slave labour, yet no one would

suggest that the Colosseum should be bracketed in the same heinous

category as Hitler’s projected ‘Great Hall’.

This is a specious argument. Speer’s plans for Berlin are indeed

fascinating. Architecturally, they are if nothing else a potent display

of the astonishing extremes that can be reached by megalomaniacal

designers. Yet, those plans cannot simply be viewed from this perspec-

tive alone: in examining them, one is morally bound to consider not

only the designs themselves, but also the brutal methods by which

they were to be realised.

The Germania project perfectly reflected the dark, misanthropic

heart of Nazism, and in realising that project Speer’s office was not

a passive, innocent bystander. Rather, it emerges as a prime mover: a

motor of policy, not only in its own narrow ‘artistic’ sphere, but also

in areas as diverse – and nefarious – as the concentration camps and

the preparations for the Holocaust. Speer’s influence, therefore, was

clearly not confined to the artistic and the aesthetic. Speer was not,

as he later protested, merely an architect.

Hitler intended his new Berlin to stand as a monument to his rule.

Appropriately enough, none of his grand designs ever saw the light of

day. Today, only the
Schwerbelastungskörper
– the mushroom – still stands.

High on an embankment in the south of the city, it is now stained and

weather-worn and weeds crowd around its base. It served its purpose.

Its gauges recorded that the earth below it
did
shift, sinking between 11

and 18 centimetres across the six measuring points – a little beyond the

criteria deemed acceptable by Speer – but whether this might have curbed

the architect’s enthusiasm, or reined in his designs, is anyone’s guess.

The mushroom was supposed to have been pulled down after the

measurements had been completed, yet the worsening situation of

the war intervened and its demolition was repeatedly postponed and

then finally abandoned. To generations of post-war Berliners, it was

a conundrum, an eyesore that should not be permitted to remain, but

which could not feasibly be demolished. It stands now as architectural

curiosity, a silent witness to one man’s megalomania.

6

Unwelcome Strangers

They would arrive at any time of day or night. Their train would

inch down the siding in a cacophony of hissing and the screeching

of brakes. Many of them had travelled in relative comfort, in third-

class passenger carriages, with simple wooden seats and luggage

racks. Others had been packed unceremoniously into goods trucks,

without seats, toilets or any creature comforts at all. All of them

would be hungry and exhausted upon arrival. Their journey, what-

ever its starting point, would have been long and arduous, with much

time spent idling in sidings, while military transports and civilian

traffic were given priority. Very few of the new arrivals had any

inkling of what awaited them. Many had no idea of precisely where

they had been taken, even of which country they now found them-

selves in.

Emerging from the train onto a small platform, the arrivals were

confronted by ranks of soldiers, police and rail personnel. There, under

barked instructions, they collected themselves and formed into a column

to march through a gate and off down a track, leading into a birch

wood. After about 100 yards, they would have glimpsed barbed-wire

fences and, in a clearing beyond, a cluster of sturdy wooden barrack

blocks. Frenchman Albert Flammant arrived there in the summer of

1944:

It was a terrible sight. The high gate was made with wooden beams

interlaced with barbed wire. To the left and right of the gate, there were

watchtowers made with rough-cut branches; above a single searchlight.

Two parallel barbed wire fences, separated by about 2 metres, marked

off a closed area, where there were numerous barracks.1

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berlin at war

There, deep in a wood known to its inhabitants as ‘the Forest

of Tears’, was his destination: the
Durchgangslager
, or ‘Transit camp’, of Wilhelmshagen.

The new arrivals were labourers. They would come to be known

as
Zwangsarbeiter
, ‘forced labourers’ or even ‘slave labourers’, though

they were officially known as
Ausländische Arbeitskräfte
, or
Fremdarbeiter

–
‘foreign workers’. Millions of them were brought in to feed the Nazi

military-industrial complex and replace those German workers who

had been drafted for military service. It is estimated that over six

million2 foreign workers laboured within Germany during the war.

They served in every capacity imaginable, from helping to gather the

harvest in rural communities, to working as servants in private homes

and labouring within the flagships of German industry.

It was not the first foreign worker programme in Nazi Germany.

A voluntary labour scheme had been rolled out across occupied Europe

in 1940, seeking to attract workers by promising adequate food, good

conditions and regular leave for visits home. However, the wartime

needs of German industry quickly outstripped the available volun-

teers. Soon, more coercive measures were being employed.

By the time Wilhelmshagen opened for business, in the autumn of

1942, workers were being ‘recruited’ across occupied Europe by means

of raids on church congregations, mass arrests, forced conscription

and intimidation. Those who arrived at the camp came from all corners

of the continent, from rural France to the western republics of the

Soviet Union. In total, it is estimated that as many as 150,000 labourers

made their way down the ramp and through the barbed-wire gates

of Wilhelmshagen.

Their new home was certainly in a picturesque area. Located at the

south-easternmost limit of Berlin’s suburbs, Wilhelmshagen was a quiet

settlement of villas and detached houses, surrounded by beech woods.

There were also lakes: the Müggelsee to the west, the Dämeritzsee to

the south, and the River Spree linking the two before meandering off

into the city centre. The logic of placing a transit camp there was

simple: not only did the semi-rural location allow a great deal of space,

it also assured a degree of privacy. Moreover, the camp was located

off a main rail line, with its own siding, on the eastern approaches to