For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. Spare, unpredictable, minutely observed, and utterly free of self-pity (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity as well as their cravenness. And with bald honesty and brutal lyricism (Elle), she tells of the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject. A Woman in Berlin is, to quote A. S. Byatt, essential, and a classic of war literature.
In the early hours of 16 April 1945, civilians in the eastern quarters of Berlin were awoken by a distant rolling thunder. The vibrations were so strong that telephones began to ring on their own and pictures fell from their hooks. Women emerged slowly from their apartments and exchanged meaningful looks with neighbours. They hardly needed to speak. The long-awaited Soviet offensive had at last begun sixty miles to their east.
One and a half million Red Army soldiers of Marshal Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front were bursting out from the bridgeheads on the west bank of the river Oder. Facing them were the desperate scrapings of the embattled Third Reich: mainly boys from the Hitler Youth, old men from the Volkssturm, groups of cadets from Luftwaffe military schools and a stiffening of veterans and SS. They had little ammunition, hardly any shells for their artillery and insufficient fuel for their few remaining armoured vehicles. Yet Goebbels, the Reich commissar for the defence of Berlin as well as minister of propaganda, had declared that the line of the Oder was a wall on which the Asiatic hordes’ would smash themselves. Surrender was out of the question. Himmler had just issued orders that any German male found in a house displaying a white flag be shot. The propaganda ministry organized graffiti squads, dressed as ordinary Germans, to paint slogans such as: ‘We will never surrender!’ and ‘Protect our women and children from the Red beasts!’
The argument for fighting on was largely based on Goebbels’s own horror propaganda of enemy atrocities, which for once turned out to be no exaggeration. In the autumn of 1944, Soviet troops had made their first foray into East Prussia, laying waste to the village of Nemmersdorf before being repulsed by a German counter-attack. Goebbels had rushed forward camera teams to film the corpses of women and girls who had been raped and murdered by drunken Red Army soldiers. The images on the Nazi newsreels had been so appalling that many women presumed they were part of a gross exaggeration by the ‘Promi’, the propaganda ministry. But then, in late January and early February, after the main Soviet assault on East Prussia and Silesia, refugees passing through Berlin recounted stories of rape, looting and murder on a terrifying scale. Yet many Berlin women, while certain that such things happened in the countryside and isolated communities, refused to believe that mass rape was possible in the public view of a capital city. Others, increasingly nervous, began rapidly to instruct young daughters in the facts of life just in case the worst happened.
Berlin at the time contained just over two million civilians, of whom the large majority were women and children. It was typical of the crazed irresponsibility of the Nazi regime at this time that Hitler rejected any idea of evacuating them while there was still time. He openly disbelieved the military commander of Berlin who told him that there were 120,000 babies and infants left in the city and no provisions for a supply of milk. Consciously or unconsciously, Hitler appears to have imitated Stalin’s refusal to allow the evacuation of civilians from Stalingrad in order to force his troops to defend the city more bravely.
This diary written by a 34-year-old journalist, begins on Friday 20 April, four days after the opening bombardment. It was Hitler’s birthday. Nazi flags were raised over ruined edifices in the centre of the city, where US Air Force Flying Fortresses by day and RAF Lancasters by night had destroyed 90 per cent of the buildings. Signs erected in Hitler’s honour proclaimed: ‘The Fighting City of Berlin Greets the Führer’. Even Hitler’s military staff had no idea how close the fighting was. Soviet tank armies had now smashed their way through the German defences and were starting to encircle the city. The first shells from long-range artillery would land in the city’s northern suburbs that evening.
The diary, which filled two exercise books and a clothbound notebook, continues for just over two months until 22 June. This period covers the bombardment, the brief streetfighting in most districts, Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, the surrender of the last pockets of resistance on 2 May and then the occupation of the city by the conquerors.
