bit more inquisitive, he might have noticed that one of the prisoners – a tall, fair-haired man in his mid-forties – looked more Russian than German. For all that his German was fluent, it was almost a little too perfect, as though it had been picked up in the schoolroom not the cradle.
But the officer went on his way without investigating further and the prisoners spilled out onto the smoking street. There was rubble everywhere, rubble and smashed steelwork. The air was harsh and gritty with soot from the fires that still dotted the city.
It was like a scene from the end of the world.
In another area, in Spandau on Berlin’s north-eastern corner a group of Soviet soldiers looked across at the ruins of the city they had fought so long to capture. The soldiers were numb with tiredness. Long exposure to the weather and the filth and smoke of war had given them an almost Asiatic colouring. They sat beside their packs, staring out at the flat, grey landscape beyond them. A few of them smoked. No one spoke.
One of the soldiers was a female driver, somewhere in her forties. She wore the uniform that marked her out as a member of a shtraf battalion, a punishment unit linked to the regular Red Army. The shtraf battalions had been given the worst jobs in a war full of horrors. The woman had been lucky to survive.
For a while, the woman sat and stared at the demolished city, doing nothing, not moving. Then she stood and climbed up onto the carcass of a burned-out truck. From her vantage point she could see more of the city: the dense black columns of smoke, the jagged edge of the ruins, the smell of scorching. She hung onto the truck and drank the sight in. Her face was too tired to express much emotion, but if there was anything at all in her eyes, it certainly wasn’t victory or elation; more a kind of wistfulness, even longing. She had brown hair and greenish eyes, with a slightly eastern slant to her eyelids. She looked like a woman who had seen a lot, suffered a lot. On her right hand, two fingertips were missing, little stumps of dark pink that ended just where the final joint was meant to be.
She got down off the truck, lay down on the chilly road, and fell asleep.
FIVE
1
Something great had been accomplished.
The war in Europe was won. The Führer’s last Wunderwaffen , his long-promised ‘miracle weapons’, had turned out to be not miraculous, just laughable: kids on pushbikes, holding anti-tank weapons they weren’t trained to use. And as for the other desperate predictions, talk of the Werwolfs who would wage ferocious underground war against the invaders, those too had turned out absolutely hollow. The war had been emphatically won. The plague which had ravaged Europe was ended.
But that just raised a whole further set of questions. What now? What next? For Germany, for Europe and the world?
Nobody knew. The Allies, in the urgency of their efforts to beat Hitler, had made almost no provision for what was to follow. About some of the big points, of course, there was agreement. Germany would not be dismembered. There would be one country, Germany, and there would be one capital city: Berlin. The nation would be divided into four zones, each to be administered by one of the four victorious powers, Russia, America, Britain and France. Berlin, too, would be divided and run the same way. But the administrative zones were simply that: lines of bureaucratic convenience. There would be only supreme occupation authority, the Allied Control Council, to be made up of the Military Governors of each zone.
And that was it. All the crucial details had been left undecided. Would political parties be allowed to form in Germany again? Would there be free speech? Democracy? Would Germany’s industry be permitted to revive? Or would the country be turned into an agricultural economy, a pastoral nation of no threat to its neighbours? What would the defeated nation use by way of currency? And what would happen to the
But the officer went on his way without investigating further and the prisoners spilled out onto the smoking street. There was rubble everywhere, rubble and smashed steelwork. The air was harsh and gritty with soot from the fires that still dotted the city.
It was like a scene from the end of the world.
In another area, in Spandau on Berlin’s north-eastern corner a group of Soviet soldiers looked across at the ruins of the city they had fought so long to capture. The soldiers were numb with tiredness. Long exposure to the weather and the filth and smoke of war had given them an almost Asiatic colouring. They sat beside their packs, staring out at the flat, grey landscape beyond them. A few of them smoked. No one spoke.
One of the soldiers was a female driver, somewhere in her forties. She wore the uniform that marked her out as a member of a shtraf battalion, a punishment unit linked to the regular Red Army. The shtraf battalions had been given the worst jobs in a war full of horrors. The woman had been lucky to survive.
For a while, the woman sat and stared at the demolished city, doing nothing, not moving. Then she stood and climbed up onto the carcass of a burned-out truck. From her vantage point she could see more of the city: the dense black columns of smoke, the jagged edge of the ruins, the smell of scorching. She hung onto the truck and drank the sight in. Her face was too tired to express much emotion, but if there was anything at all in her eyes, it certainly wasn’t victory or elation; more a kind of wistfulness, even longing. She had brown hair and greenish eyes, with a slightly eastern slant to her eyelids. She looked like a woman who had seen a lot, suffered a lot. On her right hand, two fingertips were missing, little stumps of dark pink that ended just where the final joint was meant to be.
She got down off the truck, lay down on the chilly road, and fell asleep.
FIVE
1
Something great had been accomplished.
The war in Europe was won. The Führer’s last Wunderwaffen , his long-promised ‘miracle weapons’, had turned out to be not miraculous, just laughable: kids on pushbikes, holding anti-tank weapons they weren’t trained to use. And as for the other desperate predictions, talk of the Werwolfs who would wage ferocious underground war against the invaders, those too had turned out absolutely hollow. The war had been emphatically won. The plague which had ravaged Europe was ended.
But that just raised a whole further set of questions. What now? What next? For Germany, for Europe and the world?
Nobody knew. The Allies, in the urgency of their efforts to beat Hitler, had made almost no provision for what was to follow. About some of the big points, of course, there was agreement. Germany would not be dismembered. There would be one country, Germany, and there would be one capital city: Berlin. The nation would be divided into four zones, each to be administered by one of the four victorious powers, Russia, America, Britain and France. Berlin, too, would be divided and run the same way. But the administrative zones were simply that: lines of bureaucratic convenience. There would be only supreme occupation authority, the Allied Control Council, to be made up of the Military Governors of each zone.
And that was it. All the crucial details had been left undecided. Would political parties be allowed to form in Germany again? Would there be free speech? Democracy? Would Germany’s industry be permitted to revive? Or would the country be turned into an agricultural economy, a pastoral nation of no threat to its neighbours? What would the defeated nation use by way of currency? And what would happen to the
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