A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary

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Table of Contents

About the Author and About the Translator

Copyright Page

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Foreword

It is perhaps no accident that an extraordinary work like A Woman in Berlin has had a history that is no less amazing: first published in 1953, the book disappeared from view, lingering in obscurity for decades before it slowly reemerged, was reissued, and then became an international phenomenon—a full half century after it was written. The events described are also extraordinary: the author, a woman living in Berlin, took meticulous note of everything that happened to her as well as her neighbors and friends from late April to mid-June 1945—a time when Germany was defeated, Hitler committed suicide, and Berlin was occupied by the Red Army. While we cannot know whether the author kept the diary with eventual publication in mind, it’s clear that the private scribblings she jotted down in three notebooks (and on a few hastily added slips of paper) served primarily to help her maintain a remnant of sanity in a world of havoc and moral breakdown. The earliest entries were literally notes from the underground, recorded in a basement where the author sought shelter from air raids, artillery fire, looters—and ultimately rape by the victorious Russians. With nothing but a pencil stub, writing by candlelight since Berlin had no electricity, she recorded her observations, which were at first severely limited by her confinement in the basement and the dearth of information. In the absence of newspapers, radio, and telephones, rumor was the sole source of news about the outside world. As a semblance of normalcy returned to the city, though, the author expanded her view, and began reporting on the life of her building, then of her street, then on the forced labor she had to perform and her encounters in other neighborhoods. Beginning in July, when a more permanent order was restored, she was able to copy the contents of her three notebooks on a typewriter. In the process, words became sentences, allusions were clarified, loose sheets were incorporated where they belonged. The result was 121 pages of gray war-issue paper. These pages—authenticated along with the original notebooks by a foremost expert on twentieth-century diaries—stand as a shattering indictment and complete our record of the time.

The author chose to remain anonymous for reasons that any reader can understand, and I feel bound to respect her wish, responsible as I am for the reissue of her text. What may be said, however, is that the woman who wrote this book was not an amateur but an experienced journalist. In the diary she alludes to several trips abroad as a reporter and to visiting the Soviet Union, where she picked up a basic knowledge of Russian. We may surmise that she worked for various periodicals after Hitler came to power: up until 1943–44 a number of magazines managed to avoid involvement in the propaganda demanded by Joseph Goebbels.

It is likely that through her professional contacts the author met Kurt W. Marek, a journalist and critic who facilitated publication of the diary. An editor at one of the first newspapers to appear in the new German state, he went on to work for Rowohlt, a major Hamburg publishing house. It was to Marek that the author entrusted her manuscript, agreeing to change the names of people in the book and eliminate certain revealing details. In 1954 Marek placed this version of the book with a publisher in the United States, where he had settled. Thus A Woman in Berlin first appeared in English (in an earlier translation) and then in seven other languages.

It took five more years for the German original to find a publisher and even then the company, Helmut Kossodo, was not in Germany but in Switzerland. But German readers were obviously not ready to face some uncomfortable truths, and the book was met with either hostility or silence. One of the few critics who reviewed it complained about the author’s shameless immorality. German women were not supposed to talk about the reality of rape; and German men preferred not to be seen as impotent onlookers when the Russians claimed their spoils of war. (According to the best estimates, more than 100,000 women were raped after the conquest of Berlin.) The author’s attitude was an aggravating factor: devoid of self-pity, with a clear-eyed view of her compatriots’ behavior before and after the Nazi regime’s collapse, her book flew in the face of the reigning postwar complacency and amnesia. No wonder the diary was quickly relegated to obscurity.

By the seventies, the political climate had become more receptive, and photocopies of the text, which had long been out of print, began to circulate in Berlin among the radical students of 1968 and the burgeoning women’s movement. By 1985, when I started my own publishing venture, I thought it was time to reprint A Woman in Berlin, but the project turned out to be fraught with difficulty. The author could not be traced, the original publisher had disappeared, and it was not clear who held the copyright. Kurt Marek had died in 1971. On a hunch I contacted his widow, Hannelore, who knew the identity of the author. She also knew that the diarist did not wish to see her book reprinted while she was alive—an understandable reaction given the dismal way it was originally received.

In 2001, Ms. Marek told me that the author had died and her book could now reappear. By then, Germany and Europe had undergone fundamental changes and all manner of repressed memories were reemerging. It was thus now possible to publish the diary in its full, complete form for the first time and restore passages that had previously been excluded, either to avoid touching on delicate matters or to protect the privacy of people still alive. At the same time, discussion of once-taboo issues had become acceptable. Subjects like the widespread collaboration in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere; anti-Semitism in Poland; the saturation bombing of civilian populations; ethnic cleansing in postwar Europe—which for many years had been dwarfed by the German act of genocide—were now legitimate areas of inquiry. These are, of course, complex and morally ambiguous topics, easily exploited by revisionists; nonetheless, they belong on the historical agenda and deserve levelheaded discussion. And it is in this context that A Woman in Berlin ought to be read.

It is hardly remarkable that one of the best personal records of the war in Germany is a diary kept by a woman. After all, it was the women who preserved an oasis of sanity in a world run amok. While the men were fighting a murderous war, the women proved to be true heroines of survival. To the extent that a German resistance existed, women provided the logistics. And when their husbands and lovers returned, paralyzed by defeat, it was women who cleared the rubble. Of course, this is not to say that women had no part in the Nazi universe. The author of this diary would be the last to claim such high moral ground. She is a relentless observer, unwilling to tolerate any sentimentality or hypocrisy. Though she was unaware at the time of the enormity of the Holocaust, she nonetheless saw that Germans had brought their suffering on themselves by what they had done to others. An exceptional figure, this woman of Berlin managed to keep her nerve as well as her dignity intact throughout her trials. More than that, she never abandoned her fundamental sense of decency, a trait too rarely found amid the ruins of her time.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Introduction

In the early hours of April 16, 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 neighbors. 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 and old men from the Volkssturm, groups of cadets from Luftwaffe military schools, and a smattering of veterans and SS. They had little ammunition, hardly any shells for their artillery, and insufficient fuel for their few remaining armored vehicles. Yet Goebbels, the Reich commissar for the defense 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 continuing the fight 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 counterattack. Goebbels had rushed camera teams forward 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 convinced that such things had indeed occurred 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 did happen.

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 opportunity. 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 thirty-four-year-old journalist begins on Friday, April 20, four days after the opening ground bombardment. It was Hitler’s birthday. Nazi flags were raised over ruined edifices in the center of the city, where U.S. Air Force Flying Fortresses by day and RAF Lancasters by night had destroyed 90 percent of the buildings. Signs erected in Hitler’s honor proclaimed: The Fighting City of Berlin Greets the Führer. Even Hitler’s military staff had no idea how close the front was. Soviet tanks had smashed their way through the German defenses and were starting to encircle the city. The first shells from long-range artillery would land in the northern suburbs that evening.

The diary continues for just over two months, until June 22, a period that covers the bombardment, the brief street fighting in most districts, Hitler’s suicide on April 30, the surrender of the last pockets of resistance on May 2, and then the occupation of the city by the Russian conquerors.

First published anonymously in 1954 in an incomplete English translation in the United States and then in 1959 in German, the diary was highly controversial in Germany, where some accused it of besmirching the honor of German women. Almost fifty years later, the complete book was reissued, again anonymously, but a few months after its publication Jens Bisky, a German journalist and critic, claimed to have discovered the identity of the anonymous diarist and revealed her name. A vehement controversy over exposing the author’s identity raged in various German papers, throughout which Hannelore Marek, the executor of the estate, refused to confirm Bisky’s claim. It is perhaps inevitable that in the absence of an author, some have raised doubts over the authenticity of the work, but experts on personal documents from the period have confirmed that the diary’s transcript is original and completely genuine.

Such questions are to be expected, however, particularly after the scandal over the fake Hitler diaries, and after the great bestseller of the 1950s Last Letters from Stalingrad was found to be fictitious more than forty years following its initial appearance. On reading A Woman in Berlin for the first time in 1999, I instinctively compared my reactions to those I’d had to the Stalingrad letters, which had quite quickly made me uneasy. They were simply too good to be true. One, for example, milked the reader’s emotions with a letter about a German concert pianist in Stalingrad whose fingers had been broken. As soon as I was able to read genuine last letters from Stalingrad kept in the German and Russian archives, I was certain that the published collection was false. Yet any such suspicions I might have had about A Woman in Berlin were soon discarded. The truth lay in the mass of closely observed detail. The anonymous diarist possessed an eye so consistent and authentic that even the most imaginative forger would never have been able to reproduce her vision of events. Just as importantly, other written and oral accounts that I had accumulated during my own research into the events in Berlin attest to the truth of the world she describes.

*   *   *

IF THE AUTHOR’S name is not known for certain, her character comes through clearly in her writing. In contrast to the totally closed mind of Nazi Gleichschaltung, she was liberal and receptive. She disliked the xenophobia of the regime as much as its military machismo. In her twenties, she had traveled around Europe and had even visited the Soviet Union, where she acquired some Russian. This was to prove vital once the Red Army arrived. Everyone in her apartment building turned to her, to save them from the depredations of usually drunken soldiers. Thus, she herself was placed on the front line. Again and again, the author shows bravery and resilience, her account revealing the close relationship between an inquiring mind and intellectual honesty. It is this quality that makes the diary so impressive and so important.

The only physical description of herself the diarist offers is of a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat, yet she is meticulous in recording her feelings out of an almost forensic curiosity. Her reason for writing all this is quite simple: It does me good, takes my mind off things. She also thinks of showing her account to her erstwhile fiancé, Gerd, if he comes back. Modest as her aspirations are, the author is nonetheless a brilliant observer, as much of the large historic events as of the daily life she shares with her fellow apartment dwellers. She vividly evokes the civilians trapped in Berlin and deprived of meaningful news. They know only that information from the western front, where the Americans have just reached the Elbe, is by then irrelevant. Our fate is rolling in from the east, she writes. It will transform the entire climate, like another Ice Age. She notes that horizons have narrowed: My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food. The lack of electricity and gas has reduced modern conveniences like lights and stores and hot water boilers to useless objects. We’re marching backwards in time, she writes, cave dwellers.

Deference to the Nazi regime has collapsed along with an administration that can no longer protect its subjects. Ration cards may still be stamped, but only out of bureaucratic habit. Although a few diehards proclaim their confidence in Hitler, even they no longer speak of the Führer. They refer simply to he and him. The propaganda ministry’s promises of victory and a bright future fool nobody, yet many still suffer from that powerful human desire for hope in the face of all logic. The diarist is more realistic. She glimpses a few German soldiers: That was the first time I saw real front-line men—dirty, gray-bearded, all of them old. The carts were pulled by Polish ponies, dark-coated in the rain. The only other freight they’re hauling is hay. Doesn’t look much like a Blitzkrieg anymore. Soon, everyone is looting stores and shops as the imminent Soviet onslaught and collapse of Nazi power leaves society disintegrating into communities formed and organized by building.

Beyond the breakdown of order, the biggest fear is what will happen when the Russians arrive. One young man in gray trousers and horn-rimmed glasses turns out on closer inspection to be a woman, attempting to save herself from the attention of Red Army soldiers. Other young women try to make themselves appear old and dirty in the vain hope of repelling lust. When somebody ventures that perhaps the Red Army soldiers are not so bad after all, a female refugee from East Prussia screams, They’ll find out all right. Everyone understands that the horrors she has witnessed and probably experienced were not just the ravings of the propaganda ministry.

Finally, on April 27, the Red Army reaches their street. My stomach was fluttering, the diarist writes after seeing her first Russians through the window. I felt the way I had as a schoolgirl before a math exam—anxious and uneasy, wishing that everything were already over. At first, things do not appear too bad. The soldiers in the street are playing with bicycles they have found, trying to learn to ride them. As almost all other eyewitness accounts confirm, the soldiers’ first interest is in looting watches. Most have five or six strapped around each forearm. But once evening comes and they have drunk their ration of vodka, the hunt begins.

*   *   *

ONE OF THE MOST important aspects of this diary is its careful and honest reflection on rape in war. The whole subject of mass rape in war is hugely controversial. Some social historians argue that rape is a strategy of war and that the act itself is one of violence, not sex. Neither of these theories is supported by events in Germany in 1945. There have indeed been cases of rape being used as a terror tactic in war—the Spanish Civil War and Bosnia are two clear examples. But no document from the Soviet archives indicates anything of the sort in 1945. Stalin was merely amused by the idea of Red Army soldiers having some fun after a hard war.

Meanwhile, loyal Communists and commissars were taken aback and embarrassed by the mass rapes. One commissar wrote that the Soviet propaganda of hatred had clearly not worked as intended. It should have instilled in Soviet soldiers a sense of disgust at the idea of having sex with a German woman.

The argument that rape has more to do with violence than sex is a victim’s definition of the crime, not a full explanation of male motive. Certainly, the rapes committed in 1945—against old women, young women, even barely pubescent girls—were acts of violence, an expression of revenge and hatred. But not all of the soldiers’ anger came in response to atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS in the Soviet Union. Many soldiers had been so humiliated by their own officers and commissars during the four years of war that they felt driven to expiate their bitterness, and German women presented the easiest target. Polish women and female slave laborers in Germany also suffered.

More pertinent, Russian psychiatrists have written of the brutal barracks eroticism created by Stalinist sexual repression during the 1930s (which may also explain why Soviet soldiers seemed to need to get drunk before attacking their victims). Most important, by the time the Red Army reached Berlin, eyewitness accounts and reports show that revenge and indiscriminate violence were no longer the primary factors. Red Army soldiers selected their victims more carefully, shining torches in the faces of women in air-raid shelters and cellars to find the most attractive. A third stage then developed, which the diarist also describes, where German women developed informal agreements with a particular soldier or officer, who would protect them from other rapists and feed them in return for sexual compliance. A few of these relationships even developed into something deeper, much to the dismay of the Soviet authorities and the outrage of wives at home.

*   *   *

FOR OBVIOUS REASONS it has never been possible to calculate the exact number of rape victims in 1945. A general estimate given is two million German women; this figure excludes Polish women and even Soviet women and girls brought to Germany for slave labor by the Wehrmacht. But the figures for Berlin are probably the most reliable in all of Germany—between 95,000 and 130,000, according to the two leading hospitals. These can hardly be inflated figures if one takes into account that at least a dozen women and girls were raped in the single medium-sized apartment block where the author lived. Some pockets in the city escaped completely, but not many, considering that over a million troops either were billeted in the city or passed through it. Most of these men wanted what they saw as their fair share of loot in one form or another.

A number of victims, as the diary indicates, suffered grave psychological damage, but the author and the widow she comes to live with instinctively find the best means of self-preservation. Slowly but surely we’re starting to view all the raping with a sense of humor, she writes. Gallows humor. The widow jokes to everyone they meet about the compliment she was paid by one rapist who declared that she was much better than any Ukrainian woman. The author’s sense of humor is drier. She finally manages to wash her sheets. They needed it, she notes, after all those booted guests.

Rape in war is a collective experience, she also observes, as opposed to in peacetime, when it is individual. Each woman helps the other, by speaking about it, airing her woes. But, as she soon found out, the male half of the German population wanted the subject to be buried.

These days I keep noticing how my feelings toward men—and the feelings of all the other women—are changing, she writes as Hitler’s regime collapses. We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. That has transformed us.… Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex. Her optimism proved sadly premature. The late 1940s and the 1950s, after the men returned from prison camps, were a sexually repressive era in which husbands reasserted their authority. Women were forbidden to mention the subject of rape as if it somehow dishonored their men, who were supposed to have defended them. It remained taboo until the late 1980s, when a younger generation of women started to encourage their mothers and grandmothers to speak about their experiences.

A Woman in Berlin is a war diary unlike any other. This is a victim’s eye view, a woman’s perspective of a terrifying onslaught on a civilian population, yet her account is characterized by its courage, its stunning intellectual honesty, and its uncommon powers of observation and perception. It is one of the most important personal accounts ever written about the effects of war and defeat. It is also one of the most revealing pieces of social history imaginable.

Antony Beevor

Translator’s Note

This translation, like every other, must reckon with certain challenges. Local terrain familiar to the author is foreign to us: streets and districts, outlying towns, and even the specific architecture of apartment buildings, which in Berlin are frequently built around a courtyard, with shops at street level, below the residences. In conveying this topography I have tried to make it as accessible as possible while preserving a sense of locale. Most names of places and streets have been kept in German (Müncheberg, Berliner Strasse), although a few (Landwehr Canal instead of Landwehrkanal) have been anglicized for clarity. The district Rathaus is identified once as a town hall and remains Rathaus. Military terms have been rendered with the U.S. equivalent (first lieutenant), although some Nazi-era formations have been kept in German (Schutzpolizei, Volkssturm). Schnaps is a generic word for certain distilled spirits and has been variously translated as liquor, brandy, or vodka, depending on the context. Russian words have been transliterated, with any necessary translations provided in the text.

—P. B.

A Woman in Berlin

This chronicle was begun on the day when Berlin first saw the face of war.

Friday, April 20, 1945, 4:00 P.M.

It’s true: the war is rolling toward Berlin. What was yesterday a distant rumble has now become a constant roar. We breathe the din; our ears are deafened to all but the heaviest guns. We’ve long given up trying to figure out where they are positioned. We are ringed in by barrels, and the circle is growing smaller by the hour.

Now and then whole hours pass in eerie silence. Then all of a sudden you remember that it’s spring. Clouds of lilac perfume drift over from untended gardens and waft through the charred ruins of apartment houses. Outside the cinema, the acacia stump is foaming over with green. The gardeners must have snatched a few minutes between sirens to dig at their allotment plots, because there’s freshly turned earth around the garden sheds up and down Berlinerstrasse. Only the birds seem suspicious of this particular April: there’s not a single sparrow nesting in the gutters of our roof.

A little before three o’clock the newspaper wagon drove up to the kiosk. Two dozen people were already waiting for the deliveryman, who immediately vanished in