Taking a round-about way, we arrive at Tiergarten Park. Or rather what’s left of it. Aghast, I look at the torn-up trees. Smashed, blasted, mutilated beyond recognition. . . . On Charlottenburger Chausee the smell of decaying bodies. On closer inspection we see it is only the skeletons of horses. People living in the neighborhood have cut the meat off the dead animals’ bones piece by piece, cooked it in their pots and devoured it greedily. Only the intestines are left to decay between bare bones. . . . Now we are passing the Brandenburg Gate. Pariser Platz is swarming with people. They are carrying furniture out of the Adlon Hotel. Gold-plated mirrors, plush armchairs and mattresses. . . . We turn into Wilhelmstrasse. Ruins and dust. Dust and ruins. Wherever a cellar has remained intact, trophy hunters are at work, struggling up and down the stairs like maggots on cheese. . . . There stands the Chancellery. A battered stone colossus. Cavernous and desolate, its windows look out on the ruins of Wilhelmsplatz. Nothing stirs behind these walls that hold the remains of Adolf Hitler. Before the entrance a Russian soldier is on guard. His gun across his knees, he leans comfortably back in a green silk-covered armchair. In the middle of the Court of Honor, so-called, an image of perfect peace. The sight of it makes us smile. Certainly this is not the sort of guard the Nazis had imagined for their Führer and Chancellor.
Because the Western Allies did not arrive in Berlin until early July 1945, the Soviets had two months of sole control over the city—two months to pillage, plunder, and rape with impunity. Such behavior stemmed in part from pent-up hatred of the Germans, but it was also Stalin’s policy to extract as much war booty as possible from Berlin before the Western Allies arrived. Hurriedly the Russians dismantled entire factories and put the equipment on trains heading east; once in the USSR the machines often proved useless because they were incompatible with the local infrastructure. Like the Jews under Nazism, Berlin’s citizens were ordered to surrender telephones, radios, and typewriters to the authorities. The pride of Blaupunkt, Telefunken, Philips, and Siemens piled up at various collection points, open to the elements. And just to make sure that the Berliners understood who now ran their town, the Soviets put Berlin’s clocks on Russian time and renamed streets and squares after Russian heroes such as General Nikolai Berzarin, the first Soviet city commander. They also erected a memorial to their victory just west of the Brandenburg Gate (it still stands today, minus its guards). “With this memorial,” the architectural historian Brian Ladd has aptly noted, “the Soviets staked their claim to the historical landscape: within sight of the Reichstag, astride the former site of the Hohenzollerns’ statue-laden Victory Boulevard, and at the point where Speer’s north-south and east-west axes were to meet.”
For the Soviet soldiers, females of all ages remained fair game in the first weeks after the capitulation. According to one witness, fat women (of whom there cannot have been many) had the most to fear, for “primitive people revere their fat women as symbols of abundance and fertility.” Lurid accounts by contemporaries tend to convey the impression that the majority of Berlin women were assaulted and that every other Russian soldier was a rapist. Clearly this was not the case, but abuse of women was indeed widespread during the Soviet occupation, especially in the early phases. Women were violated ten, twenty, sometimes sixty times over. Often they were beaten and maimed in the process. Some who could not live with the experience committed suicide. A twelve-year-old girl who had been raped six times hanged herself on orders from her father, who had been unable to protect her. Desperate to avoid such “dishonor,” men hid their womenfolk under piles of coal or bundled them up to look like grannies.
