Hitler’s birthday celebrations in Berlin on April 20 also had a martial air. Tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled down Unter den Linden, while bombers and fighters roared overhead. The Führer’s presents included models of ships and planes, and a plaster mockup of his planned Arch of Triumph. On July 26 Berliners practiced an air-raid drill, not perhaps the most hopeful sign for the future. Nor especially hopeful was the introduction in August of ration cards, which imposed weekly limits on meat, sugar, jam, and coffee. Also in August, the Wehrmacht General Staff moved out of its offices in the Bendlerstasse to new headquarters in Zossen, about 25 miles southeast of Berlin. Here they worked on plans for an invasion of Poland, the next course in Hitler’s anticipated pan-European banquet.
Although most Berliners did not realize it, the invasion of Poland became a virtual certainty because of an astounding diplomatic development later in August— the Nazi-Soviet pact. A secret annex to the pact provided for a new partition of Poland by Germany and Russia. For Hitler, this agreement with Stalin ensured that he could attack Poland without having to fear countermeasures from the Soviet Union. Even if the Western powers finally decided that enough was enough and went to war against the Reich, Germany would not have to open hostilities against the West and Russia at the same time, as had been the case in World War I.
Berliners, like most people around the world, were shocked by the Nazi-Soviet pact, but they were also relieved, because they thought it portended yet another reprieve from war. After all, the townspeople reasoned, Hitler would certainly not resort to war if he could get everything he wanted through diplomacy. When the agreement was officially announced on August 24, spontaneous celebrations broke out all over the city.
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NOW PEOPLE, ARISE, AND STORM, BREAK LOOSE!
THE NAZIS HAD HELD power in Berlin for a little less than seven years when they launched their drive to make Germany a world power. During their brief peacetime rule they had done much to reprovincialize their capital, reducing it from a cosmopolitan metropolis to a chauvinistic enclave hospitable only to Germans (as defined by the regime) and their allies. During the next five years they would transform the city even more—turning it first into the nerve center of their war machine and then, as a consequence of the retaliation that their military crusade provoked, into a field of rubble. While bringing devastation to Berlin, the war also provided the final context for the destruction of the city’s Jewish population. A new, albeit divided and much diminished, Berlin would eventually rise from the rubble, but the city could never repair the human damage occasioned by the Nazis’ effort to make it the capital of the world and the largest “Jew-free” metropolis in Europe.
All Quiet on the Home Front
Unlike in August 1914, Berliners did not greet the opening of hostilities in September 1939 with celebrations in the streets. People reacted with resignation to the news that the Wehrmacht was “counterattacking” into Poland in response to alleged Polish aggression. “A grey morning with overhanging clouds,” wrote CBS correspondent William Shirer in his diary on September 1, 1939. “The people in the street were apathetic when I drove to the
That evening, at seven o’clock, air-raid sirens wailed across the city, and this time it was not a drill. But no bombs fell that night, and after a brief rush to the shelters Berliners flocked to the cafés, restaurants, and beer halls. The streets were totally dark in accordance with blackout regulations. Though this made for perilous driving and walking, it also yielded a happy surprise: a clear view of the constellations over Berlin. After walking home from a shelter with a friend, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a correspondent for Ullstein, wrote in her diary: “On our way we see stars over Berlin for the first time—not paling sadly behind gaudy electric signs, but sparkling with clear solemnity. The moon casts a milky gleam over the roofs of the town. Not a spark of electric light falls upon the streets. ‘The metropolis is going back to nature,’ [my friend] Andrik smiles. ‘It’s almost enough to turn one into a romantic.’”
