Tag Archives: berlin

Stunning color video Berlin 1945

01 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by in 1945, Allies, berlin, postwar

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My research has been pretty Berlin-specific lately, so I was thrilled to find a relatively new video uploaded to You Tube. When the Allies Settled in Berlin (1945) is one of the most high quality pieces of footage I’ve ever seen of the period. And since it’s in color, allied Berlin is truly brought to life. This is footage without commentary. It’s mostly slice of life imagery.

So if you want to see Russian troops, men and women, marching down a wide street (smiling!), or British troops swimming at the Olympia Stadium, or German women joking around with the cameraman while they clean up the ruins, give this 12-minute film a look.

One of my favorite parts of this video are the images of the different armies/troops getting along in close proximity. No Cold War yet….

And if you know German, or just want to see the footage and narrative from the German side, try the long documentary Berlin unter den Allierten (1945-1949).

Pride and prejudice: the French Occupation of Germany

14 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by in Allies, French, postwar

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Germany_after_WWII_zones_F

French Zone of Germany

Of the four powers that occupied a piece of Germany after World War 2, France was the smallest and poorest, especially compared to the United States. Information about the French occupation zone is a bit harder to come by (my french is rusty, but I’m working on it!), so I’m always happy to find interesting bits in English or German.

Here’s a chapter in English from a book on public health in the French Zone. Despite the title, this isn’t just about health issues. The chapter gives some good insights into the general attitude of the French towards Germany, and the Germans toward the French.

It wasn’t an easy relationship. The French were  not going to quickly forget being invaded by the Germans in 1940 — and 1914 — and 1870. Many French believed German nationalism was a unique curse over Europe. This was true at the time, though not unusual for other European countries in other eras. France had its own nationalist and expansionist past when Napolean invaded countries across Europe 145 years before.

Regardless, postwar France saw Germany as a country to be reformed root and branch, even if it meant permanently breaking up the country and shifting its center of power from military-dominated Prussia (Berlin) to Germany’s south-west (the future capital for decades would be Bonn, not coincidentally in western Germany and not so far from the French border).

The French flag flew from the Victory Column in postwar Berlin, a pretty obvious signal to the Germans. French pride made many French treat the Germans in their zone with the same disdain and outright racism as they did native populations in French colonies. Level heads in the French military and government were alarmed by this. They quickly saw how bad relations between occupier and occupied could destabilize a Europe that desperately needed to stay at peace. With the strong USSR as a threat, Germany needed to be rehabilitated. That wouldn’t happen unless relations were normalized. The Germans — also a proud people — had to be treated better or they would continue to be a long term problem. The fate of Germany was tied to the fate of Europe as a whole.

And so the fraternization rules were relaxed, allowing French and Germans to socialize and even live together under some conditions. Franco-German marriages increased. Since France couldn’t offer its zone material goods like the US could, it threw itself into showing the Germans how much it cared about culture, the arts and sciences — something the French and Germans had in common. As early as 1946, Bastille Day was a 3-day bash in Berlin complete with regattas and fireworks.

Here’s a very interesting look at the French Sector in Berlin. (in German)

 

*Image Wiki Commons 3.0

Gladow, boy gangster of postwar Berlin

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Crime, Everyday life, Personalities, postwar

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His name was Werner Gladow, and his hero was Al Capone.

He reflected just about the worst of postwar Germany. As became clear later when he was on trial for murder, he was only interested in getting rich, and it didn’t matter how he did it — or who he had to hurt. It could be argued any sense of morality had been kicked out of him by the war and Germany’s defeat; he was 14 when the Russians took Berlin. But it was just as likely he was a sociopath to begin with. His short and violent criminal career ended with him being one of the first people to be executed in the new East Germany.

Born in 1931, he bounced from one school to another (11 by the age of 15), and landed after the war in the criminal elements around Alexanderplatz and Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, where he did what many teenagers did — tried to make a quick profit in the black market. During one of his first attempts at swindling customers, he landed in prison for a few months, where he recruited some of the first members of what would become the Gladow Gang. Between 1947 and 1949 he committed 375 robberies in banks, markets, shops and jewelry stores.

He was a smart kid and knew how to use the political situation in the divided Berlin to his advantage. His gang would commit robberies in West Berlin, then flee back into East Berlin (it was easy to go back and forth in the years before the Berlin Wall was built). The western police had no authority in the east, and couldn’t pursue them. The eastern police wouldn’t pick up the chase since the crime had been committed in the west. The next time, Gladow committed his robbery in the east and fled to the west. After awhile he got cocky, leaving visiting cards at the scene of robberies and playing up to the press.

He also got more violent. His gang acquired firearms any way they could, including mugging police. They killed the driver of a chic car and stole it, only to get it stuck in the sand near Müggelsee. They tortured a businessman and his wife for the key to their safe.

Betrayed by one of his gang, the police caught him in a gun battle worthy of a Chicago gangster. (Here’s a 1950 Spiegel report on Gladow’s arrest). He was lightly wounded on the chin, and at the sight of his own blood, he fainted. He was convicted of murder, attempted murder and assorted other crimes. When he was hanged, he was only 19.

 

 

8 million Nazis

24 Monday Feb 2014

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After the war, when Germany went into denial (which lasted quite a few years, if Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-M1129-300,_Berlin,_Document_Centernot decades), many people insisted they had never been in the Nazi Party. Their papers, they thought, were destroyed, or unavailable in the eastern lands then controlled by the Soviets. Impossible to confirm their claim, right?

One German’s gutsy gamble in the last days of the war spoiled this game.

His name was Hans Huber, manager of a paper mill in Munich. On April 15, 1945, Hans had a visitor who informed him a large amount of paper would arrive soon that must be destroyed — immediately.

Three days later, the trucks began to arrive. Twenty trucks per day, nine days long. Each contained mounds (or rolls) of paper.

But not just any old paper. The central membership register of the Nazi Party.

Every party member from the NSDAP’s founding had a duplicate card stuck in the register and stored in steel cabinets in Munich’s Arcissstraße. Everyone including Hitler.

But there was more. The party applications themselves, with personal information, photos,and signatures also fell into Huber’s hands. SS documents too, handwritten notes from Himmler, Gestapo papers. In all, he had 50 tons of paper that could incriminate big and small Nazis alike.

When he realized what he had, Huber – no Nazi – decided to bluff. He delayed pulping the paper. He claimed he didn’t have enough coal, or his machines broke down because they didn’t have spare parts. Two weeks later, the Americans took Munich.

You’d think they would have jumped on such a treasure. But at first, the army was looking for real treasure — gold and art — not paper. Huber said he approached the Americans in May 1945, but no chance. They didn’t want paper.

In the fall, he finally came across an army archivist who took a look at the paper. “Any damn idiot” could see how important it was, Sargent B. Child told colleagues later.

But even then, the Nazi documents weren’t a sensation. They traveled to a warehouse near Kassel where the US military government collected and cataloged material found across Germany. As focus shifted to war crimes trials, the Allies saw the untold value of Huber’s paper. Right there was the documentary proof of membership in the NSDAP, along with other papers that could be used in war crimes trials.

In January 1946, 15 train loads of papers traveled to their final home — the Berlin Document Center. In his memoir, George Clare described the center that year.

I had expected to find a big barracks of a place but what I actually saw when I arrived at Wasserkäfersteig was a largish suburban villa, like so many in Zehlendorf. However, the high barbed-wire double-fence round the periphery of its extensive grounds, the floodlights and the armed, steel-helmeted sentries told me I had come to the right spot.

The Americans controlled the archive until 1994, and it’s now a part of the German Bundesarchiv.

And no one who was ever in the German Nazi Party could deny it and get away with it.

*Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-M1129-300 / Donath, Otto / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

“An American is just a Russian with his trousers pressed.”

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Allies, Americans, postwar

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In February 1946, the U.S. Strategic Services Unit (SSU) released the report “Rumors in Russian Zone” that described the opinion Berliners held about American occupation troops. It was a year full of intelligence and US government reports on American activities in Germany, and much of it wasn’t flattering. Not even a year after the war, the GIs earned a reputation as “men who drink to excess; have no respect for the uniform they wear; are prone to rowdyism and to beat civilians with no regard for human rights; and benefit themselves through the black market.”

Truth or exaggeration? Was a GI in the early postwar years little better than a “Russian with his trousers pressed?” (The Russians were notorious for violence and corruption, especially in the months directly after the war). How much American corruption existed on the ground in Berlin?

An intelligence officer’s testimony before a Senate Special Committee in 1946 started an avalanche of investigations and bad press for US occupation forces. Col. Francis P. Miller, ex-executive officer with the Office of the Director of Intelligence at the US government headquarters (OMGUS) in Berlin, complained about illegal activities that reached the highest offices. They were, he said, swept under the rug by none other than Lt. General Lucius Clay, deputy military governor and director of OMGUS in Berlin. CIA historian Kevin Conley Ruffner describes the affair in his excellent article The Black Market in Postwar Berlin; Colonel Miller and an Army Scandal (Prologue Magazine Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 2002).

Miller’s accusations focused on the “moral disintegration” of American officers and enlisted men. Sexual excess and the venereal disease that came with it was just one side of the coin. The other was money. Miller pointed out that troops sent home a lot more money than was being paid out to them. In July 1945 the army’s finance office in Berlin paid troops one million dollars, “yet soldiers sent some three million dollars to addresses in America,” Ruffner says.

For Americans, Germany and Berlin in particular, was a get-rich-quick opportunity. A soldier could buy 10 packs of cigarettes for 50 cents at the PX and sell them for $100. Russians paid exorbitant amounts for watches, a status symbol. Even after the army cracked down on some of this activity, the damage to its reputation was done. Ruffner quotes the official army historian in Germany, who said the gigantic fraud “gave many Germans the impression that Americans are fundamentally dishonest and weak.”

Back in the States, Miller’s accusations were picked up by Republicans looking to damage the Truman administration ahead of the next elections. The Senate special committee appointed counsel George Meader to launch a preliminary investigation. After interviewing dozens of witnesses in the US and Germany, he recommended an even deeper investigation into the goings-on in the US occupation areas.

Even before Meader’s report was made public, the stuff hit the fan. Branches of the US government bickered over who should investigate what, and to what extent. The Truman administration opposed an investigation. It didn’t want scandal to disrupt talks with the British on economically uniting their German zones. General Clay opposed an investigation because of the propaganda capital the Soviet press would get from it.  The major US press reported on allegations of fraud, failure and incompetence in the military government. The Senate special committee’s chair Senator Kilgore (D- West Virginia) criticized Meader — his committee’s counsel — for succumbing to “hearsay, rumors and gossip.”

At one time, four army and government investigations were under way at the same time. But by 1948, the issue had blown over. The Soviet threat and the Berlin Airlift were more important than raking up accusations about corruption.

I highly recommend Ruffner’s article, as well as a close read of his excellent footnotes. The scandal may be forgotten in the general postwar/Cold War narrative, but it gives a fascinating glimpse into the early US occupation of Germany.