If Berlin’s thriving black market pointed up a certain impotence or benign neglect on the part of the occupiers, the same can be said of their policy regarding the political crimes of the recent past. In principle, an interallied program of denazification was supposed to eliminate all vestiges of Nazism in German life and bring surviving offenders to justice. Of course, this policy applied to Berlin along with the rest of the vanquished Reich. But in the capital, as elsewhere, many of the leading Nazi criminals had either died or managed to disappear. Some Nazi functionaries had actually vanished with Allied help, since they had valuable information or talents that they could trade for their freedom. Such was the case, for example, with General Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed the Wehrmacht’s intelligence operations against the Red Army during the war. He was flown out of Germany by the OSS, then returned in 1950 to West Germany to run a new American-backed spy agency aimed at the USSR and East Germany.
The Soviets, for their part, had dismissed all Nazi party members from public jobs shortly after taking over the city. Yet within weeks many of these individuals, having changed their political livery from brown to red, were back in positions of trust. The Soviets also revived the Nazi-era network of neighborhood spies, the “block wardens,” often employing the same men who had done this job for the Nazis.
The British and Americans tackled denazification in a characteristic Anglo-Saxon way: they sent out
Armed with their denazification documents, Berliners descended on the Allied employment offices looking for work. George Clare, who vetted job applications in the British sector, recalled an endless procession of antifascists who claimed to have always admired Churchill and hated Hitler. In light of this procession of virtue, he could not help wondering how it had happened that the Nazis had managed to become the largest party in the Reichstag. Nonetheless, in their haste to hire reasonably competent natives, he and his colleagues generally did not scrutinize the applicants too closely.
The Golden Hunger Years
The wartime Allies’ mission to denazify Berlin extended to culture. The plan was not just to purge the local arts scene of politically problematical influences but to impose a whole new culture based on “humanistic” and “democratic” values. But the victors differed when it came to defining exactly what these ideals meant and how the cultural makeover should be achieved.
As we have seen, during their brief tenure as sole occupiers of Berlin the Soviets revived certain segments of the local culture, and they continued to be active in this domain after the Western powers arrived in the city. Aware of the importance that culture held for Berliners, the Russians brought in knowledgeable experts to run their cultural affairs division and allowed them considerable leeway to create programs that would be attractive to the natives. In overall charge of Soviet cultural policy was Colonel Sergei Tulpanov, a bear of a man who resembled Hermann Göring both in his girth and in his ability to mask his political agenda with backslapping bonhomie. His chief assistant was Alexander Dymschitz, a product of the educated bourgeoisie who thoroughly knew his way around German culture. He, like many in the Russian cultural bureaucracy, was of Jewish origin. In setting policy in Berlin the Soviets were not hindered by any pretense of nonfraternization. With their support the above-mentioned Kulturbund sponsored a Writers Congress attended by former “inner emigrants” and political exiles from both East and West. The House of the Culture of the Soviet Union on Unter den Linden organized exhibitions of Russian painting and lectures by noted Soviet authors. The Soviets reopened the renowned Deutsches Theater, which had survived the bombing relatively unscathed, and placed at its head the former avant-garde director Fritz Wangenheim, who promised to enlist the theater “in the broad democratic front of the German renewal.”
