Berlin at War (64 page)

hearing of their scheduled deportation. Many of them – perversely –

would be nursed back to health and then deported to their deaths.

Other patients were removed as a matter of routine; the entire psychi-

atric ward, for instance, was deported en masse to Theresienstadt in

November 1943.

One of the most remarkable stories to emerge from the Jewish

Hospital is that of Ursula Finke, a young Berlin Jew who was living

underground. In August 1944, Ursula was caught by a
Greifer
while

standing on the platform at Gesundbrunnen S-Bahn station. As she

was being arrested, she managed to escape her captors and jumped

in front of an oncoming train. When she came to, she was being

pulled from beneath the train by railway personnel, with her lower

leg and foot mangled almost beyond recognition. She was then put

into an ambulance and driven to the Jewish Hospital, where she was

taken straight into surgery. Ordinarily, the foot would have been ampu-

tated, and Ursula would have been deported to Auschwitz as soon as

was possible. But the hospital director sought to save Ursula’s foot by

a series of time-consuming and excruciatingly painful operations. If

it
was
a reprieve, it certainly didn’t feel like it. As Ursula recalled: I remained incarcerated . . . behind barbed wire in the [hospital], chained

to the bed, the foot for months in traction, with the most intense pain.

At night the surveillance personnel came through the rooms, stuck

flashlights into beds to see that everybody was there, and constantly

people were transported away, even on stretchers, so that I ended up

having screaming fits out of fear of being transported away in this

condition.66

In spite of everything, however, Ursula survived to the end of the war.

By 1945, the hospital resembled a Jewish ghetto, with a secure block

for fugitives, a permanent Gestapo presence and a
Sammellager
, or

‘collection camp’, for those former patients who were waiting to be

deported. The deportations, though much more infrequent than they

had been, nonetheless continued with the same grim efficiency to the

end of the war. Fugitive Jews would be collected from across the city

306

berlin at war

by the Gestapo and kept at a number of secure collection centres –

like the former hospital – until enough had been gathered to fill a

‘transport’. These transports continued on average at monthly inter-

vals, carrying fifty or so unfortunates each time. The final one –

carrying forty-two Jewish deportees – was sent to Theresienstadt on

27 March 1945.67

Less than a month after that last transport, Wedding, and with

it the former Jewish Hospital, was overrun by the Soviets. On the

morning of 24 April 1945, as the Red Army closed in, some eight

hundred Jews remained – many bedridden and close to death – in

the squalor of those once pristine wards. Alongside the 1,400 or so

fugitives who were estimated to have survived illegally in the Berlin

underground, they were the last representatives of a community

annihilated.68 But when those Jewish survivors emerged to greet

their liberators, they were met with consternation. One Russian

soldier stated categorically that it was ‘not possible’ that they were

Jews. In his best broken German, he explained his reasoning, ‘
Nichts

Juden. Juden kaput
.’ ‘You can’t be Jews’, he said. ‘The Jews are all

dead.’69

15

Reaping the Whirlwind

By early 1943, Berliners had grown accustomed to the calm. After

the first spate of bombings through late 1940 into the spring of 1941,

there had followed a period of almost two years in which RAF raids

on the capital became fewer and farther between. For the second

half of 1941, the few nightly visits that there were had consisted

mainly of leafleting and low-intensity nuisance raiding. The whole

of 1942 had seen only a single British raid on the German capital.

Berliners were beginning to feel secure, even optimistic.

So, when the RAF reappeared in the skies over Berlin on the night

of 1 March, it came as a shock. Dieter Borkowski spoke for many

when he recorded in his diary that no one had expected the return

of the bombers after such a long absence.1 What surprised Berliners

most, however, was the sheer intensity of the raid. Official reports

gave little away, but eyewitness accounts were rather more loqua-

cious. Secretary Helene Braun sent a breathless account to her nephew,

describing the destruction around her home in Kreuzberg:

The night of 1/2 March was the worst air raid that we have experi -

enced in our area. All around us, to north, south, east and west, the

sky burned red, and the black branches of the trees were clearly visible

against the fiery glow. The danger was very close. The property at no.

21 in our street, with two courtyards and side buildings, has been badly

hit and the fires there could only be extinguished at about 5 o’clock

this morning. Numerous houses in Grossbeerenstrasse are a sea of

flames. The big corner house on Hagelbergerstrasse and Möckernstrasse

is almost completely destroyed. The goods yard on Yorckstrasse is still

burning!2

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berlin at war

It was soon apparent that the destruction wrought across Berlin

that night was greater than had been seen before. A Swedish source

claimed that fires burned in the city for fully three days and that the

destruction caused by the raid was ‘at least ten times that of all . . .

previous raids’.3 Another eyewitness noted that the fires that night

seemed to burn with an ‘unusual intensity’. They were correct. Though

the people of Berlin would not have known it, they had endured the

largest tonnage of high explosives that had yet been dropped in the air

war – a payload of over 900 tons that was twice the amount the

Luftwaffe had dropped on London in their largest raids of the Blitz

in 1941.4 As well as the countless incendiaries, one novelty was the first

appearance of the ‘cookie’ or ‘blockbuster’ – a 1,800-kilogram high-

explosive bomb capable of destroying entire blocks. One eyewitness

experienced the blast of one of these weapons that night in the south-

western suburbs: ‘a powerful, thunderous explosion’, he wrote, ‘with

a pressure wave that I had never experienced before, and which made

me feel as insignificant as a tiny ant . . . In the darkness, I felt myself

all over, and realised that I was still alive.’5

The havoc wrought that night is testament to the severity of the

raid. Most spectacularly, the Catholic cathedral of St Hedwig – on

the Opernplatz, in the very heart of the capital – was severely hit,

with the large, domed roof collapsing into the building’s interior, which

subsequently burnt out. Nearby Unter den Linden suffered a number

of hits, as did the prestigious Wilhelmstrasse and Friedrichstrasse. The

elegant Prager Platz in Wilmersdorf was reduced to rubble. The former

American Embassy building – the Blücher Palais – on Pariser Platz was

also damaged, as was Göring’s Air Ministry building, where more than

two hundred rooms were wrecked.6

Berliners witnessed destruction on an unprecedented scale. As Ruth

Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary the following day: ‘The city and

all the western and southern suburbs are on fire. The air is smoky,

sulphur-yellow. Terrified people are stumbling through the streets with

bundles, bags, household goods, tripping over fragments and ruins.’7

Even in those buildings that were not destroyed outright, the damage

incurred could be substantial. One young flak helper recalled seeing

the destruction in a home close to his. ‘Everything that was not nailed

down’, he wrote, ‘had been hurled to the floor. Between the smashed

windows there were chandeliers, the remains of vases and crystal

reaping the whirlwind

309

bowls and piles of smashed porcelain. Everywhere, glass fragments

crunched beneath our feet.’8

The human cost was also considerable. Estimates of those killed

and injured varied, but contemporary accounts concluded that nearly

500 civilians were killed in the raid, with a further 2,000 or so being

injured. In addition, over 100,000 Berliners were thought to have been

rendered homeless. It was the deadliest raid Berlin had yet suffered.

Equally damaging perhaps was the effect on morale. As the SS

mood reports conceded, the raid of 1 March 1943 profoundly dented

the faith of ordinary Germans in the ability of the state – and particu-

larly the Luftwaffe – to protect them.9 It did not escape Berliners’

attention, for instance, that the raid had come on the night of the

annual ‘Day of the Luftwaffe’, in which there had been marches and

grand ceremonial in the city.10 With this humiliation, the Luftwaffe

began to lose the sympathy of the German public.11

Returning to the capital on the train from Munich on the morning

after the raid, Goebbels had been informed that Berlin had suffered a

serious attack, but its full severity did not become clear to him until

he approached the station and realised that the rail tracks themselves

had been uprooted. After his arrival, he set about touring the affected

areas. The city centre, he noted, ‘looked a mess’, and the suburbs

‘were an even less comforting sight’. He consoled himself with the

positive attitude of those Berliners he met. ‘One must not believe’,

he wrote in his diary, ‘that the population of Berlin are not capable

of withstanding such massive raids.’12 His optimism would soon be

put to the test.

Berliners had been repeatedly told that theirs was the best-defended

city in the world. And, for once, Nazi propagandists were telling the

unglossed truth: Berlin’s air defences really were state-of-the-art.

The centrepiece of the hugely impressive network of defences in

the city was the three Berlin flak towers. The first of these concrete

behemoths appeared on the capital’s skyline in April 1941, in the heart

of the Zoo, to the west of the city centre. It rose some 39 metres into

the sky – taller than the nearby railway station at Bahnhof Zoo, taller

even than the tallest trees in the nearby Tiergarten. In the rather flat,

low-rise landscape of Berlin, it would have been hard to miss.

Broadly square in plan, the tower’s side walls – over 3 metres thick

310

berlin at war

and over 70 metres across – were rendered in raw concrete and

studded with small windows. Resembling a huge medieval fortress,

it was adorned at each corner with a squat, octagonal tower, and

beneath the roof were five floors of storage rooms and air raid shel-

ters, even a hospital ward. Designed to accommodate eight thou-

sand civilians, it also provided an air-conditioned home to many of

the valuables from Berlin’s museums, including the golden treasures

of Priam and the bust of Nefertiti.

The building’s sheer size was not only the result of the Nazis’

passion for monumental architecture. It was in essence an enormous

static gun platform – and it fairly bristled with weaponry. At each of

its four corners, there was a heavy-calibre anti-aircraft gun. The 128mm

‘Dora’ flak gun was one of the largest produced during the war, and

weighing in at over 25 tonnes – with a further 25-tonne recoil force –

it required a substantial structure to support it. In addition, guns of

lesser calibres, such as the 20mm
Vierling
, or four-barrelled ‘quad’

weapon, were located elsewhere on the roof.13

Apart from the Zoo flak tower, two identical towers were erected

to form an arc around the centre of Berlin, one at Humboldthain to

the north and the other at Friedrichshain to the east. Each flak tower

– known as the
G-Turm
, or ‘battery tower’ – was accompanied by a

nearby
L-Turm
, or ‘command tower’, which was of a similar size

and equipped with searchlights, listening equipment and radar

installations.

The flak towers were meant to intimidate Germany’s enemies, but

they also served to convince Berliners that they could be protected

from the RAF. They certainly made an impression on the American

journalist Howard Smith. The Zoo tower, he wrote,

looks like a fantastic monstrosity from a lost world, or another planet.

It is huge and positively frightening just to look at. . . . It is an enor-

mous, square clod of cement a hundred feet high, about five or six

storeys. It is painted green so as not to be too visible among the trees

from above. On each of its corners is a long, powerful gun, pointed at

the sky.14

Living nearby, Missie Vassiltchikov noted the new addition to the

skyline in her diary in April 1941: ‘Our flat is very near the Zoo bunker’,

reaping the whirlwind

311

she wrote, ‘which has just been built of heavy concrete. It is very high

and sprouting with flak guns, and is considered the safest air-raid shelter

in this part of the town. When the guns start firing the earth trem-