Berlin, year zero : The Iron Curtain falls – Part 4: a divided city

This article is from Military History Matters issue 150

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The victorious powers gathered in Potsdam outside Berlin in July 1945 for the conference that would determine, among many other things, the final shape of the occupation of Germany. Only a few miles from where the Allied leaders and their staffs met, the country’s once-magnificent capital lay in ruins. Berlin had been bombed around the clock by the US Eighth Air Force by day and by the RAF at night for about 18 months. And the close-quarter fighting in the Battle for Berlin in April and May had left whole districts flattened. One third of all buildings in the city had been destroyed and thousands of acres had been reduced to rubble. No city in Europe, except for Warsaw, had suffered destruction on the same level.

Most of the occupying forces believed the Berliners had brought this on themselves by their support for National Socialism and the Nazi regime. Few had any regrets at the scale of devastation, believing the city’s residents deserved it. Very few people could have foreseen that over the next decade and a half West Berlin would be transmuted from the hated enemy’s defeated capital to become the very symbol of Western resistance to the Soviet Union – an island of freedom and democracy in a sea of tyranny. Less than 20 years later, President Kennedy would declare that West Berlin was in the front line of the battle for freedom, and that: ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin…’. It was an extraordinary transformation.

Cigarettes became the new currency as the black market flourished.

BERLIN IN RUINS

After years of heavy bombing and weeks of intense street fighting, by the summer of 1945, approximately one-third of all buildings in Berlin were completely destroyed – some 50-60,000 buildings. Another third were heavily damaged to the extent that they were uninhabitable. According to assessments by the US Strategic Bombing Survey and British Intelligence, roughly 13-16,000 acres of the central built-up area of the city were utterly destroyed, with nothing more than rubble remaining. The centre of the city, the government buildings, the Reichstag, and the area around the Brandenburg Gate and the Unter den Linden (known as Mitte) were flattened. Water and sewage systems had been destroyed, and electricity was in very short supply. Many districts had no running water. Food was desperately short. About 1.5 million Berliners were homeless, out of a pre war population of 4 million (although nearly 2 million had fled the city or been evacuated during the war). Many surviving buildings and apartment blocks were occupied by several families, and overcrowding was extreme.

But the first shoots of recovery were showing, as groups of women lined up with buckets and barrows to clear the streets of rubble and debris. Before the men returned to their shattered homes, either freed from prisoner-of war camps or as survivors of the defeated Army Groups, these scenes of women clearing up their city are now seen as the very first signs of the recovery of the city and of the economy: the beginnings of what would later be described as the German ‘economic miracle’.

Zones of occupation

The Red Army had captured Berlin in the intense and bitter battle for the city from mid-April to early May 1945. Some 80,000 Soviet soldiers had died in the battle, and although there are no exact numbers, almost certainly more than 100,000 Berliners had been killed. But in the agreements reached at the Big Three summit at Yalta in February earlier that year, not only would Germany be divided into four zones of military occupation, but Berlin itself would also be divided as a microcosm of occupied Germany into four zones – American, British, French, and Soviet. The first Western troops arrived in Berlin in July, from the US 2nd Armored Division that had fought its way across Europe from Omaha Beach to Germany, and from the British 7th Armored Division, also known as the ‘Desert Rats’, who had fought from Belgium across northern Germany. Churchill was doubtful that Stalin would provide free access to the city, but when these first Allied troops arrived, the Soviet forces allowed them in without issue and detailed discussions took place as to where the exact borders would fall between the occupied zones.

The zone allocated to the Soviets was the largest sector, taking up much of the eastern half of the city. It extended from the northern suburbs down through the historic centre, including Alexanderplatz, the Unter den Linden, and much of the old city. The Brandenburg Gate marked the western border of this zone.

The American sector took up the south-western corner of the city, including the districts of Zehlendorf, Schöneberg, Steglitz, and Tempelhof, home to the city’s major airport.

The British zone was north of the American sector, a strip across the western half of the city. It included Charlottenburg, Tiergarten, and parts of Wilmersdorf. It also included the main prison at Spandau, where Nazis found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials were jailed: Rudolf Hess was imprisoned there, and Albert Speer spent 20 years incarcerated within its walls. The ex-Luftwaffe airfield that became RAF Gatow was in this zone, too. The stadium that had been used for the 1936 Berlin Olympics eventually became the headquarters of the British occupying forces.

The French zone was the smallest sector, tucked into the north-western corner of the city. It included the Reinickendorf and Wedding districts.

Initially, there was free and open access from one zone to another. The American sector bordered the Soviet zone to its north-east, and as relations between the occupying powers worsened, a small border-crossing post would later be opened at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse. Known as Checkpoint Charlie, it became legendary over the next few decades as a symbol of Cold War confrontation, a conduit for the exchange of spies and a focus for espionage.

The wake of victory

As Berlin was about 100 miles inside the wider Soviet zone of Germany, it was agreed in September 1945 that there would be access to the city from the west via a set of rail routes. In the following month, three separate air corridors were also designated to reach the city by plane. A four-way military body was set up to govern the city, known as the Allied Kommandatura. It would meet two or three times a week, and was made up of senior officers from each of the four occupying armies. Major-General Floyd Parks, commander of the US First Airborne Army, was the US representative; Major-General Eric Nares of the Cheshire Regiment was the British; Colonel-General Alexander Gorbatov was the Soviet; and General Roger Noiret was the French. They were supported by legal advisers and technical experts. Each commandant had the right of veto. This body oversaw citywide issues, such as policing, transport, and food distribution, while local German administrators handled day-to-day tasks under Allied supervision. At first, in the wake of victory, the meetings of the Allied Kommandatura were relatively friendly and decisions were made about managing the war-ravaged city with unanimous approval.

US servicemen seemed unbelievably wealthy to impoverished locals.

Each military government set up command posts, requisitioned buildings, and supervised German municipal offices. Their duties included disarming remaining Nazi units, restoring public order, and overseeing the process of ‘denazification’. They also helped to regularise food distribution and restart basic facilities. Through 1945, most of these meetings were preoccupied with practical affairs and reflected the harmony between the victorious powers at the end of the war.

However, from the start, the Soviets – having suffered from the massive land invasion and the laying waste of thousands of square miles of their territory by the retreating German Wehrmacht – demanded vast reparations from Germany. Right across their zone, and within Berlin as well, factories were demolished and transported to the Soviet Union, where they were rebuilt brick by brick, and equipped with machinery seized at the same time. The British and the Americans were aware of the damage caused by the reparations taken from Germany after the First World War, and of how keeping Germany impoverished helped create the climate in which Nazism flourished. Their governments came to realise by 1947 that for its recovery Europe needed a strong, economically sound Germany, with a revived industrial base in the Ruhr (within the British zone of occupation). The French were somewhere between these two positions. Having also been conquered and occupied, and after a century of rivalry, they sought revenge on Germany, but gradually fell in line with their Allies in realising the need to build up Germany.

Within Berlin, where food was in short supply, the black market flourished. The existing currency, the Reichsmark, gradually became worthless, and cigarettes became the principal unit for barter. Within a couple of years after the end of the war, the Western powers resolved that a new currency was needed to ensure economic stability. Arguments about introducing this new currency came to dominate the meetings of the Allied Kommandatura, and ultimately would completely split it.

Liaisons blossomed between Allied troops and German girls.

Slowly, the inevitable divisions amplified, fierce arguments ensued, and the decision-making process slowed right down. Added to the disputes over currency reform, there were further rows about industrial policy and the treatment of former Nazis. Political issues increasingly divided the four commandants. The Soviets insisted only parties that were aligned to the new Socialist Unity Party should be licensed. The Western powers insisted on pluralism and free elections. Communist thugs broke up political meetings in the Western sectors and local leaders were threatened with violence. All four military commanders began to use their veto, causing deadlock in the Kommandatura. The US representative by this time was Brigadier Frank L Howley, and he was involved in so many shouting matches with his Soviet counterparts that he became known as ‘Howlin’ Howley’. Effective cooperation between the four powers was breaking down.

Meanwhile, within the city, each occupation force brought its own customs and rituals to Berlin. American military bases across the country imported their own supplies of food, drink, and culture. American soldiers usually lived apart from the people who surrounded them. Their bases were known as ‘Little Americas’. In Berlin, the US forces had their own cinema and started a radio station, Radio In the American Sector (known as RIAS). They played jazz and big-band music of the day, which proved immensely popular with the locals who listened in. American servicemen seemed unbelievably wealthy to the impoverished locals, and American soldiers were often seen giving out the chocolate bars they had in abundance to groups of young kids for whom chocolate was a longed-for luxury.

The British had a permanent garrison of about 3,500 men in their sector. The Military Tattoo was started in 1947 and became an annual event, with marching bands and plenty of music. It was another popular event with Berliners. And, despite initial prohibition, Allied soldiers began to mix with the local population – with the result that liaisons inevitably blossomed between Brits, Americans, and German girls.

FRATERNISATION

Fraternisation between soldiers of the occupying forces and local girls was initially banned. But it proved impossible to stop active young men, miles from home, from meeting and getting to know attractive young women. In July 1946, realising it was impossible to prevent the inevitable, the British Army lifted its restrictions on British soldiers marrying locals. The first marriage between a British soldier and a local girl is thought to have taken place on 22 March 1947, when Sergeant Harry Furness of the York and Lancaster Regiment married Erna Maria Karhan. They had first met in the summer of 1945, when Sergeant Furness spotted Erna hanging washing on a line outside her temporary home. They began to see a lot of each other, as Furness was garrisoned nearby, and he was a good linguist so he soon learned German. Before long, they felt they were a perfect match. But, although they became engaged in early 1946, the Army prevented Furness from marrying his fiancée until after formal restrictions had been lifted. Hundreds and, over the decades, thousands of British, American, and French soldiers married local girls. Although Harry and Erna Furness met a lot of hostility when they first came to Britain to live after he was demobbed from the Army in the early 1950s, this soon subsided and they enjoyed a long and happy life together. They were married for nearly 70 years.

Collision course

Between 1945 and 1947, the military occupation of Berlin moved from a fragile four-power partnership into tense confrontation. The arguments between the Soviet military representatives and the three Western Allied military leaders laid the foundation for the eventual split of the city into two hostile halves – East and West Berlin.

This tension in the city took place in the context of rapidly deteriorating relations between the Soviets and the Western powers in Germany as a whole. An Allied Control Council, a national version of the Kommandatura in Berlin, supposedly governed Germany with the four military powers all represented. The Control Council meetings grew increasingly cantankerous, with continuing arguments over reparations and the introduction of economic reforms. In March 1948, the Soviet representative Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, who had been Soviet commander Georgy Zhukov’s Chief of Staff during the Battle for Berlin, astonished the others by getting up and abruptly walking out of the Council meeting in protest. The Western powers decided to carry on with the economic integration of western Germany by finally introducing a new currency, the Deutsche Mark. This would bring financial stability in the American, British, and French zones of West Germany, and in their zones in Berlin as well. The Soviets said this was a conspiracy of Wall Street bankers, and announced they would introduce their own new currency, the Ostmark, in eastern Germany and in Berlin.

At the same time, the Soviet military authorities began to close down the rail routes into Berlin in breach of earlier agreements to keep free access into the city. American military observers objected – but the Soviets insisted on their right to inspect military personnel and freight that was heading into Berlin. The Western powers responded by announcing that their occupation zones would effectively come together in a new state, West Germany. This seemed to formalise the division of Germany – and, naturally, divided Berlin found itself at the centre of the dispute. By June 1948, the situation was deteriorating rapidly.

On 18 June, the Western Allies introduced the Deutsche Mark as the new legal currency. Later that day, the Soviets closed off road and rail frontiers connecting Berlin with the west. On 22 June, the Soviet military introduced the Ostmark, announcing that it would be the sole currency acceptable in Berlin. The Allied leaders responded by saying this decree was null and void in the west of the city. It seemed that Berlin was on the brink of a major crisis. No one knew what would happen next, nor how the Soviet military authorities would respond.

Taylor Downing’s latest book The Army that Never Was: D-Day and the Great Deception is out now in paperback (Icon Books, £10.99).

In the next issue of MHM: The Berlin Airlift and the first major confrontation between East and West.

Images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated