The Sunday Star (June 10, 1945)
Berlin is gaunt, seared mass of rubble, U.S. newsmen find
Stench of death hangs over German capital, but children play and some folks can sing
By Eddy Gilmore, Associated Press war correspondent
BERLIN. June 9 (AP) – The capital of the Third Reich is a heap of gaunt, burned-out, flame-seared buildings, with mile after mile of destruction. It is a hot desert of 100,000 dunes made up of brick, stone and powdered masonry.
Over this hangs the pungent stench of death.
Berlin unquestionably is living proof of the most awful vengeance which a modern people have brought on themselves. It is a city more ruined than London after the fire raids, Warsaw after all her sufferings and Stalingrad after one of history’s most furious battles. I saw the ruins in those cities and now, in company with other Allied correspondents brought here from Moscow. I have seen Berlin.
The Red Army commandant of Berlin, Col. Gen. Nikolai E. Bezarin, said 45 percent of the buildings and houses in Greater Berlin are destroyed beyond repair. Downtown Berlin has been bombed and shelled into oblivion.
Yet the song of Berlin today – and they are singing in its cabarets and night clubs – is called “Berlin Will Rise Again.”
It is practically impossible to exaggerate in describing the destruction of Berlin. Col. Bezarin said Allied aviation dropped 65,000 tons of bombs on it and that the Red Army in eight days concentrated 40,000 tons of artillery shells on it.
Berlin’s population now is 3,000,000. The Russians estimate, with more Germans coming in hourly. There are 40,000 wounded German soldiers in the city, and this also complicates matters.
Food, of course, is Berlin’s great question mark.
When the Red Army entered Berlin, the population was on the verge of starvation. The situation has been met by hurrying in food from outlying districts, from beyond the borders of Germany, and even from the Soviet Union itself.
The ration set-up is on rigid lines. There are four general categories and an additional one for children. Heavy workers come first. Then come light manual workers, white-collar workers, and then dependents! such has housewives and invalids.
Bread and potatoes are the mainstay of the ration, which is:
- Potatoes: 400 grams (18 ounces) daily to all.
- Bread: 300 to 600 grams daily (13.6 to 27.2 ounces).
Berlin is a city of flags – Allied flags. They hang from every house and building. They are Russian, American, British and French, and I’ve seen a few Canadian and Chinese flags.
Most of the streets are now open, but some are nothing but twisting lanes through the rubble.
Downtown Berlin looks like nothing man could have contrived. Riding down the famous Frankfurter Allee, I did not see a single building for two miles where you could have set up a business even of selling apples.
Smoke was beginning to rise from what was left of Berlin’s factory chimneys, but the vast majority of the stacks are still smokeless.
The most familiar scene downtown was lines of women working to clear up the debris.
Women put to work
Most of the women look between 18 and 40. They are generally fairly well dressed and certainly more of them have on silk stockings or ersatz silk than the women of London when I last saw them.
No Russian soldier was standing over these people. They are assigned their task by a German foreman and go about the work without Russian supervision. Frankly, however, they do not seem to work too hard. They laugh, joke and talk.
Their shift of four hours daily is taken when it suits them best and for this they are paid 70 pfennigs an hour (7 cents at the United States military exchange rate). Bread costs 40 pfennigs a kilogram (2.2 pounds) and is plentiful. I visited 30 or more stores. They all had bread. All rations are at fixed prices.
Berlin seems to have an enormous number of bicycles. The Russians have confiscated some autos which had been left by the Nazis in civilian hands, although I have seen plenty of Germans riding in cars and today I saw two with chauffeurs. Next to bicycles come baby carriages. They have become Berlin’s most universal means of transport for family belongings, wood, food, kitchen utensils and clothes, as well as babies.
Fuel is scarce
Fuel is scarce in Berlin and for his reason people have descended on parks and the outlying areas to gather wood.
Street scenes are hard to keep from watching You see everything from the very poor to gorgeously gowned women with scarlet lips and penciled eyebrows. Most of the men wear golfing plus fours.
There are not many men. Most of them are old, or young boys, although in the last two days I have been seeing more and more young men who look as if they are just out of uniform.
There are sidewalk restaurants, but they sell only ersatz coffee.
An American uniform draws stares, but nothing is ever said to the wearer unless he stops. Then the Germans want to know mostly when the Americans will be in Berlin.
German civilians said the bombing was hell, and that most of the hell came when the United States Air Force was overhead.
Children play on tanks
Children play on burned-out tanks and the wrecked transport of the German Army. I was curious to see if they were playing war, but after watching several groups I was convinced they were not.
Little girls are playing dolls, and some of them have taken a violent interest in traffic direction. All of Berlin’s traffic is directed by Red Army girls – one on every corner waving yellow and red flags. Little Berlin girls have fashioned themselves traffic flags and often stand in the center of blocks imitating the Red Army girls.
Adolf Hitler’s chancellery, where high Nazis gathered to gloat when Germany was winning, now is a mound of stones and sticks and fantastic odds and ends of blasted glory.
The only living thing at the chancellery I saw left over from the Nazi regime was in Hitler’s garden. There in a pond a lone goldfish swam aimlessly in the stagnant waters.
Entering Hitler’s office after walking through parts of the bombed, shelled and fire-swept chancellery building, the first thing that strikes you is the fantastic disorder and destruction. The office room is about 90 feet long, oblong, with one side lined with windows looking out over a garden of several acres.
Directly before the windows was Hitler’s long, blood-red marble map table. Where Hitler planned a conquest of the world the table was battered and chipped.
Rug rolled up
A rolled-up rug, long enough to cover the whole room – was on the floor. The Nazis must have rolled it up, for Red soldiers who entered the chancellery said nothing in the room had been changed.
There are numerous books around. Memo pads and notebooks in calendar form. On one I discovered Hitler had a date as far ahead as May 20. I also picked up a visiting card. It turned out to be that of Hitler’s personal adjutant, Martin Bormann.
Hitler’s private telephones were strewn about the wreckage, battered to pieces but still recognizable. Obviously this place had been heavily bombed and shelled from the window side of the room.
When the Soviets captured the chancellery they found 20 or more bodies in this garden, battered almost beyond recognition.
In the chancellery courtyard near an overturned bucket lay the sparkling head from a statue of the late Paul von Hindenburg.
Great, dark wooden doors with gilded hinges and handles stand at the entrance to Hitler’s office. Above three central doors are golden shields with Adolf Hitler’s initials, “A. H.,” on them. And inside is the battered Nazi sanctum.
Upstairs are the rooms of various Hitler assistants. Each room is filled with scattered books, rubber stamps, soiled bed linen and pillows and overturned filing cases.
Medals litter halls
And then there are medals – littered up and down the broad hallways, on the steps, in the offices – all the medals of the Wehrmacht and the Third Reich. Hundreds of them, together with yards and yards of campaign ribbons. There are motherhood medals, too, and Luftwaffe awards.
Off in one corner is a battered high silk hat. Beside it is one of these certificates to a German mother. On top of the certificate was a pair of dirty Nazi underwear.
Near Alexander Platz on the way to Unter den Linden once stood Woolworth’s store. It’s one of the most completely wrecked places in Berlin. It’s literally not worth a dime today.
We halted near the Kaiser Wilhelm I Monument. There had been heavy fighting here, and while the emperor is still intact at the top of the monument, some lesser figures have crashed to the street and are lying about in a bronze lack of dignity. The base of the statute now bears hundreds of names of Russian soldiers.
Unter den Linden blasted
Unter den Linden, from one end to the other, is a line of blasted, bombed and smashed-up buildings. Not a single building is intact on either side of the street. Most are complete wrecks. Some piles of stones and rubble are 15 feet high. Anti-aircraft guns are sprawled about – their barrels twisted, their sides blown out.
Red Army girls direct traffic, which is mostly sight-seeing Russian soldiers. A Berlin policeman in full uniform was looking on, learning the signals which now prevail in the capital. He had all his equipment except his gun and stick. These policemen are hand-picked, and the Soviets as yet have not returned their sticks to them.
The Russian and British Embassies are just shells. Around the corner off Unter den Linden is the worst mess of all. The American Embassy is just a few gaunt walls with nothing between what was the roof and the cellar except powdered stone and brick.
Many bombs had fallen in Unter den Linden, but these once, great gaping holes have been filled in.
At the end stands the Brandenburg Gate, its beauty battered. Its columns, some of which had big holes in them from shelling, have been patched up. It looks like a gate again. However, the portion to the right of the columns as you face them has caved in from a direct hit.
Off to the right is the wrecked Reichstag. It is just a shell. Its center dome has fallen in. All the windows have been knocked out. Its columns are chipped and chopped and hundreds of tons of masonry lie about. It is one of the most wrecked places in the city. Inside are more hundreds of tons of plaster, statuary and stone work. Attendance cards of deputies – cards they checked in time clock fashion – are ankle deep about the floors. All the walls are covered with initials of Red Army soldiers, initials, names and dates.
Inside Brandenburg Gate leads the Charlottenburger Alice through the heart of the Tiergarten. President Truman probably will be surprised to hear it but his portrait in brown chrome coloring, alongside that of Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin, beams out in the very center of this great highway.
On the other side is a big picture of Premier Stalin, Mr. Churchill and President Roosevelt at the Crimea Conference.
Tiergarten is wilderness
The Tiergarten itself is a broken green wilderness.
Just as Berlin’s houses and buildings have no roofs, the Tiergarten’s celebrated trees have no tops. They are all blown away by bombs and cannon fire. Beneath them is a forest of steel and iron. Wrecked tanks and machine guns, rifles, automobiles, anti-aircraft weapons, armored cars and a few parachutes still hang on the splintered trees.
At the far end of the Tiergarten stands the badly chipped golden column of victory. Sandbags are above the base. They were for the use of German machine gunners who fought it out here. Near the base is the grave of a Red Army man, buried where he fell.
All of Berlin’s embassies are badly bombed except for the Japanese, which is not so badly damaged.
Berlin’s famous zoo, where some of the bitterest fighting in the entire campaign occurred, is a scene of destruction. Practically all its buildings are leveled. No animals are around. The mammal house and the aquarium are bombed out, but at least their walls are standing.
Churches hard hit
Berlin’s churches suffered badly. The bombing wrecked hundreds of them. In the last days the Nazis took to the stone steeples with machine guns and as a result big guns were turned on them. There is hardly a steeple which does not have a shell hole.
There are strange but familiar sights around the city. There are many gasoline stations and numerous American soft drink signs. There are numerous line-ups for food. Most of them are at meat shops. The bakeries are well-handled and the supply is plentiful.
Throughout the city appear numerous signs in German with Premier Stalin’s words. Probably the most impressive is the one outside Hitler’s chancellery which reads:
“The strength of the Red Army consists in that it has not and cannot have any race hatred against any people, not even against the German people.
“It is raised in the spirit of equality for all peoples and vested in respect for the rights of all people.”
