25 April 2006

Linking Up

If you were in the northern part of central Europe sixty-one years ago, you would be anticipating the end. The Allied armies were poised to link up at the Elbe River, and Germany was just about done.

People were getting ready for what was next in most places. The conference to determine it had been held in August of 1944, only two months after the landings in Normandy. The Big Four met at Dumbarton Oaks, in the residential part of upper Georgetown.

The stately home had been the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, who donated it to Harvard University in 1940 for the public good. I'm a Harvard man, by accident, and I was there over the weekend, in the rain.

The foliage in the garden was lush, and the President of China was in town to meet President Bush. The papers were filled with stories of the resurgent China, announcing that it was striding the world stage for the first time in hundreds of years.

But that was absurd. China was a charter member of the Big Four, and her representatives were in the Music Room at the mansion in 1945, and walked in the gardens to contemplate the world being born.

Of course, it was the wrong China, and our memories are as short as those of the reporters who give us the daily news.

Places where the war was just news were ready for the change as well. Argentina was concerned that it would be part of the next negotiations in San Francisco to sign the United Nation's Charter, scheduled for June.

As the guns began to go quiet on the continent, young Americans in uniform began to wonder when they would take ship for the Pacific, and what it might be like to die in Japan.

The planners and the public might have been prepared to move on with things, but there was an inconvenient detail that needed to be settled.

Hitler was now an irrelevancy, but he still lived in his Bunker and would not give up. The monster would have to be gouged out of his hole in the ground.

Stalin wanted his head, which he got eventually, or at least part of it. But to do so he assembled the largest and most lethal ground force of the war.

Three Soviet commanders, Zhukov, Rokossovsky and Konev commanded two and a half million troops, with supreme command passing to Marshall Zhukov.

They confronted a rag-tag remnant of German Army Groups Vistula and Central, led by General Heinrici, who would be the last hero of the Third Reich. He spolied Russian plans to take Berlin by Lenin's birthday on the 22nd, which may have been faint glory to the civilians who waited for the change. Resistance further inflamed the Russian leaders, who were determined to ensure the Americans and the British did not have a chance to claim the capital.

He who rules Berlin, rules Germany, went the logic. He who rules Germany, rules the Continent.

Confronting the Russians were shrunken formations of the regular army, elements of the fierce SS who fought with unmatched ferocity, faithful unto death.

Squeezed between the armed hordes were three million civilians. They were mostly women, children and men too old to be pressed into the pathetic Volkessturm militia.

There was no getting away from it. Deserters hung from the lampposts as reminders of the cost of betraying the Fuhrer, even at his last hour.

I was at the Commissary at Fort Myer over the weekend. It was raining and shopping was an excuse to get out of Big Pink. There is an aisle next to the produce section that is stocked with real German food, a product of the Army's long stay in the Fatherland, and the marriage of generations of G.I's with the local women.

One of them works a shift at the Concierge desk in Big Pink's lobby.

Her name is Eva, the same as Hitler's secret mistress and brief Bunker wife. This Eva was not in Berlin in that particular April, though her two sisters were. She was a young girl at the time, and made it to the relative safety of the American lines with an Aunt and some cousins. Her two sisters did not.

Eva is no more a proponent of German victimhood than I am. The Nazis had to be crushed, and with sufficient brutality to ensure that their like were never seen again.

“Suppose Hitler had won?” she asked me one slow afternoon, when there was no one to bother her. “It is unthinkable.”

I am inclined to sympathize with our one-time Allies, the Russians, who bore the brunt of an astonishingly horrific struggle. I like the Russians I have met personally, even the Communists, who I now know winked through the rhetoric, and were always good for a vodka when the official talking was over.

But it is hard to conceptualize what it would have been like to be a woman of any age in Berlin, old or young, waiting for the Russians to come.

Aterwards, the Germans of the East did not want to talk about what their Soviet occupiers and allies had done. Western Germany had no political gain to be made from reminding the public that the most helpless among them had been subjected to an orgy of intimate assault unparalleled in scale and intensity in human history.

No one talked about it then, but Eva heard first hand from one of her sisters when they were re-united months later. The other could not talk, and did not for the rest of her life. Crazy, she was, made mad by the experience. Beevor estimates ten percent of the victims committed suicide rahther than live with it.

Recent scholars like Anthony Beevor claim that at least two million women were raped. He might be conservative about that, since no one ever bothered to investigate. Berlin was an afterthought. A new world was being born.

Eva said she did not know about that. But her sister said that with all the windows on the buildings blown out, the screaming went on all night, for weeks.

By August, the Potsdam Agreement was reached, the same month the Victors met in San Francisco to sign the documents of the new world. Eventually, the Americans and British and French arrived to take their sectors of Berlin. But in the meantime, the Russians organized things to their preference.

Humans are remarkable in their flexibility. They have a means of coming to terms with almost anything.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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