When the Russians Came

SHANOR, DONALD R .

When the Russians Came Battleground Berlin: Diaries 1945-1948 By Ruth Andreas-Friedrich Paragon House. 261 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Donald R. Shanor Director, International Division,...

...But there are also accounts of the numerous small triumphs over adversity —of Berliners organizing cabaret performances of Brecht and other authors long banned, of volunteering to sing hymns at funerals to qualify for the extra food rations given performing artists, and of voting by a margin of 82.5 per cent, despite threats and attempts at electoral fraud, against surrendering the independent Social Democratic Party to a merger with the Communists...
...A great deal has been written about the beginnings of the Cold War in terms of international conferences and government decisions...
...We invaded their country, killed their men, carried away their belongings," another resistance member reminds the group...
...Andreas-Friedrich and other Berlin intellectuals found it difficult to make excuses, especially as the occupation wore on...
...The plundering and the shooting, the insecurity and violence aren't over yet...
...Those who wonder today why German unification took so long to accomplish might well read the diary entries three years after the War's end, as the Communists prepared aunity plebiscite: "The message sounds tempting...
...Too much has happened that cannot be understood...
...and behind all this stands the threatening shadow of the GPU [Soviet secret police...
...Andreas-Friedrich, who died in Munich in 1977, guessed right on the building of the Wall, but she could not envision the decline of Soviet power...
...First of the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and of running risks to express anti-Nazi opinions...
...As a final service, the diaries portray this misery and the courage it took to cope with it...
...Behind the People's Committee is the government of the Eastern Zone...
...Reviewed by Donald R. Shanor Director, International Division, Columbia University School of Journalism From their cellar hideaway in the rubble of Berlin at the end of World War II, a small group of anti-Nazi resistance fighters—"two illegals, two semilegals, three quasi-legals"—could not tell whether the shots they heard above them were being fired by Nazi werewolves or Soviet occupation troops...
...But behind the plebiscite is the People's Committee...
...The outcome of that vote was of course ignored...
...You can't overnight turn an army of soldiers drunk with victory...
...If the Soviet Union wants a single currency, withdrawal of the occupation forces and peace, why resist...
...Because we are afraid," is the response...
...into paragons of virtue," he remarks, adding that Soviet officers in his area had tried but failed to control their men...
...If one day they generously support efforts to get the economy started, the next day they dismantle dozens of factories...
...She was a perceptive and sympathetic observer, concerned with the human costs of the occupation but also aware of the larger issues being fought out in Berlin: the forced merger of the Social Democrats with the Communists, the struggle over currency reform that led to the blockade, and other events that split Germany apart for 45 years...
...The breath of Genghis Khan blows through the forests of Brandenburg," she wrote at one point...
...The occasion was the division of the city into rival Communist and democratic camps after the municipal government moved to West Berlin...
...Nevertheless, it reflected the spirit of quiet resistance that kept isolated West Berlin alive in the following dark decades, that sustained the dissidents in the city's Eastern sector and throughout East Germany, and that eventually accumulated enough strength to push down the Wall...
...Her diaries are filled with dire predictions of Communist victories in Western Europe, the defeat of the individual, and a new triumph of totalitarianism that would negate all the sacrifices made during the War against Hitler...
...the Soviet Military Administration...
...Then of the GPU, the concentration camps, and of running risks to express anti-Soviet opinions...
...By 1948, 200,000 people from the Soviet Zone were missing and presumed transported to the USSR...
...We have been afraid since 1933...
...A village mayor, himself a resistance leader, describes the need for nightly civilian patrols to protect life and property...
...The mayor understands...
...Many were War criminals, but others were outspoken journalists, Social Democrats and, in one case known to the author, a sympathetic Soviet occupation official...
...When the lawlessness of the Red Army subsided, it was replaced by political coercion and secret police kidnappings of those who objected to the new policies...
...But it has burned too many...
...The diaries kept by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist and editor, tell the story from the perspective of ordinary people...
...Behind the government...
...The dark streets still resound every night with the piercing screams of women in distress...
...Hope and trust in the Soviet Union to serve as a liberator from fascism turned to disappointment and fear almost the moment Russian troops arrived in April 1945...
...Perhaps by tomorrow we will have two city governments and along the sector border a Chinese wall with battlements and watchtowers," she wrote in 1948, 13 years before the actual construction of the Berlin Wall...
...We waited for the light from the East...
...The diaries tell of a private meeting at East Berlin's Charité hospital where doctors disclose that half the women of the city have been raped by Soviet troops...
...As this chronicle of the first three postwar years in the German capital reveals, the nationality of the soldiers would not have made much difference...
...Through their pages, we see a stream of humanity on the otherwise deserted East-West Autobahn, refugees from the Soviet-occupied East, barefoot, carrying belongings on their backs, some of them dying on the highway...
...Such pessimism is understandable in the ruins of a city and an economy...
...During the last months under the Nazis nearly all of us were pro-Russian," she noted in May 1945, only a few weeks into the Soviet occupation...
...It took more than four decades for the Soviet Union'seconomyandmilitarytoweaken to the extent that Germans in the former Soviet Zone and East Berlin felt its control could be challenged...

Vol. 74 • January 1991 • No. 1


 
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