Broken Lives Read online

  After a saturation bombing, major cities looked like a wasteland in which no one could continue to live. Worried about her home town, Ulm, Renate Finckh was glad when a telegram announced: “Parents healthy. Business destroyed.” During leave, she saw that “the parental house at the edge of town was still standing” and her father was trying to fix the holes in the roof. “We were nailing the shattered windows shut with boards and cardboard,” happy to be alive. But the next morning they “struggled through the smoking ruins of the city center. The streets are completely impassable.” It remained dark “since smoke and dust clouds block the light.” But “most horrible is the stench. It smells a thousandfold like burned flesh.” Because there might be survivors under the rubble, “everywhere hooded figures shovel with dull faces.” In the destroyed family store, they found “a small white coffee pot” with a broken spout. The BdM leader “registered the horror with rare clarity,” but still did not want to abandon her Nazi beliefs. Private pictures of endless ruins graphically show the extent of Berlin’s destruction (image 16).64

  The air raids created a new group of bombing victims who had lost everything in contrast to their more fortunate neighbors who had escaped somehow. Wherever possible, stunned survivors of the inferno gathered their family members and few rescued possessions in order to walk into the safer countryside, hoping to be received by friends or relatives. “Please come to us, even if you have nothing left. We shall share everything with you,” wrote a former servant who invited Eva Peters to her home. Those who stayed behind in damaged buildings had to bury the many dead, clear away the rubble from the streets, and repair their own apartments so as to have shelter from the elements. If their house was destroyed, they were billeted with strangers who had enough space but resented the newcomers. Even Nazi supporters such as Lore Walb noted that the war was coming home. “The terror attacks have become unexpectedly horrible…. Countless people perish in every attack; irreplaceable cultural values are being destroyed.”65

  16. Destroyed Berlin. Source: Kempowski photo collection.

  The continual pounding from the air also gradually made it clear to young women that the war economy was grinding to a halt, for new damage could no longer be repaired. The destruction of railway tracks, switches, and bridges made transportation haphazard, especially when the ubiquitous “low level strafers” (Tiefflieger) were hitting trains. Since raw materials could no longer be delivered, war production plateaued and the new miracle weapons did not get to the front. Ursula Baehrenburg noted that “letters from Berlin complained that the supply of food no longer sufficed and our relatives suffered from hunger.” With rations continually shrinking, only those folks with friends in the countryside could count on having enough to eat. Moreover, during the cold winter of 1944–1945, city-dwellers froze because mining output decreased and coal was no longer distributed equitably. Eva Peters noticed that the initial “enthusiastic support of broad circles of the population” was “replaced by a no less stable, fatalist, desperate resolve.”66

  Among Nazified girls, the surprising news of the July 20, 1944 attempt to kill Hitler triggered a “mixture of feelings” ranging from fear to relief. “Evil officers, despicable traitors have tried to assassinate our Führer,” noted Renate Finckh. “But nothing happened to ‘HIM,’ the greatest German. The criminals have already been caught.” During the BdM flag-raising, she spoke to her charges from her heart about “loyalty and the unbroken faith in victory.” Similarly, Eva Peters felt relieved at “having escaped from a terrible danger”: at no other moment her “beloved and adored Führer appeared to be more irreplaceable than at this point in time.” Instead of reinforcing resentment against a pointless war, the resistance plot often had the opposite effect, for to some people, Hitler symbolized hope. “There was another final wave of great solidarity with a man to whom the German people had abandoned themselves.” Peters recalled a renewed resolve “for the defense of people, home and fatherland, for the ultimate struggle over being or nothingness, life or death.”67

  In spite of military retreats and “terrible air attacks,” committed young women clung to their faith in the National Socialist cause. “The misfortune began with Stalingrad,” Lore Walb wrote, acknowledging a succession of defeats including the “irresistible advance of the Russians” in the East and the gains of the Anglo-American invaders. “We all ask, what will the future bring??? Germany cannot perish—and yet one sees no way out. The [Allied] superiority is overwhelming.” As a result of continued reverses, “my eternal optimism and faith are now almost completely gone.” Despite irrefutable evidence that defeat was inevitable, these Nazified young women rejected the obvious conclusion that they had served a false cause. Eva Peters was disgusted that the initial opportunists were now “carefully distancing themselves.” Believing in “duty and loyalty” until the end, Renate Finckh even enrolled in a Nazi leadership academy. When her distraught father asked, “don’t you see that everything is over?,” she could only stutter, “I—do—not know it.”68

  The hardening of the struggle at the front and at home also suppressed any sympathy for the real victims of the Third Reich. When Renate Finckh observed “a young woman tied to a pillory, her hair shorn and spit at” because she had had an affair with a French POW, her mother argued, “This is war, and tough measures are necessary. The enemy is ruthlessly trying to destroy us.” Finckh was uncomfortable sitting at the same table with slave laborers or prisoners at a farm, even after she realized that they were just people like herself. She was shocked when her brother Werner returned “shaken and upset” from the East, relating that the train tracks “were beleaguered by starving women and children,” crying out, “please bread, please bread! [sic].” She could not forget having earlier seen the haunting eyes of a Jewish classmate in a column of deportees, since “thereafter [she] knew.” She wondered why another friend who “had a terrible experience” in the East was sent to a mental hospital.69 But concern with her own survival tended to trump human compassion.

  During the winter of 1944–1945 it became “scary, how the war [was] approaching the borders” of the German Reich. “Combat became ever more brutal. The front retreated,” Ursula Baehrenburg remembered. “The cities were bombed. In our village we saw the glow of fires from Stettin.” While the Red Army was overrunning East Prussia and rushing to the Oder River, the Americans were capturing Aachen and trying to cross the Rhine. Though fleeing soldiers signaled the impending defeat, there were neither “official warnings” nor any “evacuation plans for the civilian population.” The Mahlendorfs and other families had to decide on their own when “to pack our belongings” because it was “no longer safe” in Silesia due to the advance of the enemy. The key question became “When would it be our turn to flee?” If one left too early, one risked losing all possessions, but if one stayed put, one might no longer get out. While the military withdrew some personnel to the rear, many civilians waited until it was too late.70

  Especially behind the Eastern Front, rumors of Russian atrocities spread like wildfire, fanned by a Nazi propaganda that tried to rally troops for a desperate defense through fear of revenge. When the Wehrmacht recaptured the village of Nemmersdorf in East Prussia, “our soldiers found the raped and mutilated bodies of women, children, and old men.” They had been slaughtered indiscriminately. According to Ursula Mahlendorf, Goebbels made the most of the massacre, screaming in a radio address, “This, my fellow countrymen, is what awaits you if you surrender! We will never surrender. You must fight to the last drop of blood!” Wounded soldiers in a field hospital knew that the Red Army was retaliating for the atrocities previously committed by the Wehrmacht: “We must have shot the entire village when one of ours got a bullet from a partisan—old men, women, and even the kids” and particularly Jews.71 Because Germans could expect no mercy from the approaching conquerors, they could only hope to escape retribution by fleeing to the West.

  The cowardly flight of the local party leaders in the final weeks of
the war disillusioned young women who were trying to cling to their Nazi faith. “When the Russians break through,” one soldier explained to volunteer nurses, “you will have to know how to defend yourself” by using rifles and antitank guns. On another morning, a high BdM leader exhorted them to fight: “You may die bravely … you might be taken prisoner … they’ll take you to Siberia, but remember you are proud German girls. Keep your purity.” But the next day this Nazi functionary was gone, leaving her distraught charges behind. While her girlfriend fumed, “the big wheels are leaving for the West and letting us kids take the shit,” Ursula Mahlendorf finally understood “that our ‘leaders’ are forsaking us.” Enraged over this adult betrayal, she “was utterly bewildered and confused” when Hitler ended his life by his own hand. Out of desperation, she even joined a suicide pact with other BdM leaders, but was fortunately saved by realizing “I want to live!”72

  With the approach of the front, panic spread among the deserted civilians. The first to flee were the Baltic Germans and East Prussians, who were forced to leave their homes, animals, and possessions behind. Led by noblewomen such as Countess Isa von der Goltz or by resolute farmers, entire villages set out westward to reach safety in the core of the Reich. From late 1944 on, Ursula Mahlendorf began to witness such treks with “horse drawn wagons, piled high with suitcases, bedding, bales of hay, old people, children. People fleeing, people bedraggled, stone faced, silent, wheels crunching on snow.” The roads were overcrowded with wagons driving next to each other, while the center was kept open for military vehicles. Initially marshals, the NSV, or the Red Cross tried to provide shelter and food at night from the bitter winter cold. But what started out as a semiorganized stream soon dissolved into utter chaos. Soldiers and civilians were desperate to escape a trap that was closing further by the hour. Ruth Weigelt recalled, “I only wanted to hide, see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.”73

  In the eastern cities, women with friends or families increasingly ignored the “prohibition of wild flight,” leaving on the last trains, army trucks, or anything that could get them away from the approaching Red Army. On February 1, 1945, a despondent Jakobine Witolla “started the trek across the ice of the Frische Haff,” walking thirty kilometers in the cold to reach a refugee camp in Danzig. Many farmers driving wagons with horses broke through the ice and drowned; some refugees were shot by Soviet airplanes, while infants and the old “died of cold or exhaustion.” But Jakobine and a friend were lucky enough to meet a couple of sailors who invited them onto their ship. After carousing all night, the captain actually allowed them to stay on the small military vessel and got them to Kiel unharmed. Though sad about losing her home, she took a train to Hameln, where her parents were overjoyed to see her alive. By contrast, many other ships, such as the army transport Wilhelm Gustloff, overcrowded with refugees, were sunk by Russian submarines, resulting in the loss of as many as nine thousand lives in a single stroke.74

  The Silesians had more warning; they had already been able to observe the mass flight from further east. When the Russian offensive stalled temporarily, some chose to stay. Others retreated to the safety of the mountains. With her husband fighting nearby, Ruth Weigelt did not know where to go: “Just leave? Abandon home?” Inge Lindauer’s family decided to flee in February 1945 on a Red Cross train via Thuringia to the Austro-Bavarian border. By March the first bombing raids on Prague made it clear to Ruth Bulwin that she had to flee with baby Brigitte. “Our house was not hit, but we finally woke up!” Sending some of her possessions ahead via the still-functioning mails, she obtained a travel permit. But the few trains that were still running were so overcrowded that she had to fight through people hanging from doors in order to get on. Separated from her child, she heard her cry, but was lifted in through a window, managed to recover her, and did reach her aunt in Rudolstadt.75 During their flight, the frightened refugees witnessed indescribable scenes of both ruthless egotism and selfless help.

  Rampant fear even spread to the western areas of Germany, forcing young women to decide how to deal with the arrival of the Americans. In Alzey, Lore Walb helped feverishly to pack up the military dental clinic where she worked without knowing where the facility would be relocated. In late March she confided to her diary, “The enemy has entered our dear homeland and I have fled.” A concerned druggist warned her against staying because “the Americans are perhaps a little less brutal, but you should not expect anything good.” Though she “did not know what to do,” Lore placed her belongings into a backpack and left her distraught mother in order to bike to a village further in the rear where a girlfriend lived. Encountering the sad refugees from Mannheim, she cycled for 230 kilometers in spite of flat tires and strafing planes until she finally reached Ebingen, where she “was received so nicely and warmly that she felt almost at home.”76 Toward the end of the war, it seemed that half of Germany was on the move, trying to find someplace safe.

  Those young women who left East Prussia, Pomerania, or Silesia too late were ultimately overrun by the advancing Red Army. Ursula Baehrenburg never forgot that the local Nazi leader threatened her father with a pistol to leave the horses when he had loaded his wagon. “We were all desperate.” But suddenly Ukrainian slave laborers turned up with a team and they all were able to drive into the forest to hide. They clung together under the tarp because the night was so cold. “Terrible fear made us all unable to move. I cried for many hours.” On the second day the foreign men signaled, “the front has passed”: they had survived and could return to the village. Similarly, Ursula Mahlendorf fled with other nurses in a maelstrom of soldiers and civilians with “everybody running for their lives.” During one chaotic night “the Russians overtook us” in the Sudeten mountains, but she remained unharmed and set out on the dangerous path of returning home.77 Up to one million other women and children were not so lucky and perished during the mass flight from the East.

  Amplified by rumor and propaganda, one set of female fears of the Red Army centered on the fate of German soldiers due to the violence of the final struggle. Having not heard anything from her son who was missing in action, one worried mother kept hoping that he might somehow still be alive. Jakobine Witolla was greatly relieved when she finally got a postcard in 1946, proving that her husband was living in a Soviet POW camp. Loved ones worried that soldiers who had managed to shed their uniforms on their way home would be discovered and sent to Siberia. Ursula Baehrenburg recalled how civilians like her father were rounded up as well: “The Russians are taking the men away. Dad was grabbed from the bakery without shoes.” Her mother was overwhelmed by the loss: “Papa is gone, now I also have to die. I cannot live without my husband.” She refused to eat, lay in bed, and was dead a few days later.78 Going beyond legitimate security concerns, the brutality of the Red Army left abiding resentment in German memory.

  Another area of women’s concern was what would happen to their possessions. Since “our enemies had always been pictured as barbarians,” Ingrid Bork remembered, “we buried our most precious things in the ground.” Of course, Hitler pictures, Nazi emblems, and anything else that could implicate people in the Third Reich were thrown away. Ursula Baehrenburg recalled that Russian soldiers on horseback “looked awe inspiring” when they threatened to shoot German women. “Wardrobes and drawers were ripped open, banknotes and papers torn apart, valuables taken along.” Ursula Mahlendorf similarly described that during her flight “now and then … a Russian soldier broke rank, either to ask for a watch or some jewelry from a refugee.” Once she even laughed “as he pushed the tenth or eleventh watch up his arm. He grinned back at us.”79 Beyond the age-old military desire for plunder, there was also much gratuitous destruction, perhaps inspired by resentment against the superior living standard of most German homes.

  The greatest female anxiety concerned the inviolability of their own bodies when sex-starved and drunken Russian troops sought revenge for what the Wehrmacht had done to their women. It was essential to avoid the dreaded
command “Frau come!” in order not to be dragged screaming into the woods. German women developed desperate strategies to escape the inevitable. Some teenagers who were young enough “dressed as a boy.” Other women wore rags, dirtied their faces with ashes, and smeared themselves with blood to make themselves unattractive, or held onto crying children. Ursula Baehrenburg hid in the attic of her house after being saved by a Ukrainian slave laborer from the first rape attempt. Still acting as nurses in a stationary hospital train in Silesia, Ursula Mahlendorf and a girlfriend “crawled into a space below the cabinets,” with wounded soldiers lying in front of them. “All through the night, we heard women crying out, men cursing, children screaming, wagon doors rolling open and shut.”80 Using such tricks, she escaped unharmed.

  For less fortunate girls, the experience of being raped was so terrible that the shock remained etched into their psyche “for an entire lifetime.” After the death of her mother, Ursula Baehrenburg no longer tried to hide. A few days later a “Mongol came into the room,” grabbed her and dragged her along. When she tried to run to the cemetery, he pushed her into a garage full of refuse and oil. “Pointing a machine pistol to my head, he tore the clothes from my body. With pain, revulsion and fear I experienced the brutality of my first encounter with a man. I menstruated strongly and blood flowed down my legs.” After it was over, she “lay there alone, with only one thought and wish, to be able to die.” But even through this unbearable anguish, “resistance grew in me. I began to live again.” This horrible experience was shared by up to two million women, including Edith Schöffski, who sacrificed herself to save other mothers and children. “The psychological pain which had been inflicted upon me was irreparable.” The shame attached to this violation was so great as to create a taboo that rendered exact counts impossible.81