GERMANY: City of Death

The U.S. took over its section of occupied Berlin, death-ridden capital of a dead empire, last week. Along a road marked off by the Red Army, a column of 4,000 U.S. vehicles rolled toward the shattered city. As the Americans crossed into suburban Zehlendorf, a dismal rain fell. Cried some gaunt Berliners : “Gott sei dank — Thank God!” Others stood silent and sullen.

Next day — the Fourth of July — the Americans lined up in the courtyard of Lichterfelde’s former SS barracks. Opposite them was ranged a Red Army detachment. Major General Nikolai Baranov, commander of the Russian garrison in Berlin, welcomed the newcomers. General Omar N. Bradley, commander of the U.S.

Twelfth Army Group, replied. Bands played the national anthems of Russia and the U.S. The Stars & Stripes fluttered up a staff until it flew level with the Hammer & Sickle. A 48-gun salute was fired. Then the Russians marched smartly off.

Mark of Death. In the rubble-heaped city, now fully opened to the Anglo-U.S. press for the first time since its capture ten weeks ago, two things at once impressed the Americans : the mark of death, and the mark of the Russians.

Death stared from the cadavers of mighty buildings; the smashed, charred bones of the Reichstag (see cut); the battle-broken Chancellery, where Adolf Hitler and his paramour, Eva Braun, may have died; the ruins of the Propaganda Ministry, Foreign Office, Kroll Opera House and almost every other notable Berlin edifice. The stench of death rose too from corpses still rotting under debris, from the corpse-clogged Liitzow Canal, from hasty, shallow graves dug in every park and Platz.

Mark of the Russians. The Russian imprint was also everywhere. In their period of unilateral rule, the Russians had appointed the Bürgermeisters for all Berlin’s boroughs and an Oberbürgermeister. They had opened, under their own rules, a few schools, movies, cafes. Their buxom women troops acted as sentries and traffic police. Their stolid Red Armymen drove confiscated cattle and horses along the Kurfurstendamm.

They had placarded the ruins with huge portraits of Stalin and with posters that proclaimed: “The destruction of the German nation is not among the aims of the United Nations.” They had conscripted German women for work gangs. An ordinary Hausfrau had to put in one six-hour day each fortnight clearing rubble (see cut). Wives of Nazi Party members labored six days a week at 72 pfennigs (approximately 7½¢) an hour.

The Russians had exacted “reparations in kind” on a large scale. When the British occupied their area of Berlin, they found the immense plant of Rheinmetall-Borsig (25 blocks, 70,000 workers) stripped of heavy machinery that had produced gasoline and Tiger tanks. Of 2,500 machines, only 300 were left. Key equipment from textile mills, sugar refineries and other factories had also made the long trip to Russia. Said a German manager appointed by the Russians: “There is no question of our producing anything. Our productive capacity is absolutely nil.”

The conquered capital was divided like a pie into four slices (see map). The Americans occupied about a quarter, mostly residential. The British held another quarter, partly residential, partly industrial. The French occupied only one borough, a thin wedge between the British and Russians. The Red Army slice was biggest—almost half the city, including its business heart. As far as the Elbe River, the Russians controlled all outlying regions through which the Allied supply routes ran.

And almost immediately a hitch developed. Four days later the U.S. military governor, Colonel Frank Howley, admitted to correspondents: “The Russians are running all of Berlin.” Marshal Zhukov’s Red Army officers continued to issue orders to all of Berlin’s 20 borough heads, paid no attention to British and U.S. “authority.”

Early this week it appeared glaringly obvious that the Big Three might have a very practical and pressing problem to solve.