Summer, 1945: Adjusting to life under Russian occupation

My dearest grandchildren,

It is almost 100 degrees in Gig Harbor, WA today. Tomorrow is forecast to be about 103, and on Monday the anticipated temperature will be a whopping 109 degrees! The all-time high for the Seattle area is 103 and that has only happened twice in history. Clearly, climate change is a real thing and I shudder to think what kind of world we are leaving for you. I want to apologize for my entire generation – and those before me – for leaving you such a mess to clean up.

I can only imagine that in the summer of 1945, many Germans asked what kind of world they were leaving for their own children and grandchildren. Germany was in ruins, German infrastructure was in tatters, and German citizens were starving. The future must have looked bleak, indeed, and I’m sure many adults wanted to apologize on behalf of their entire generation for leaving their children such a mess to clean up. Literally.

My father speaks in this post about severe food and water shortages and soup made from potato peels in water because no other food could be secured. He speaks of being lucky enough to secure water in a pail and then spending hours heating it over a flicker of a flame because fuel was so scarce.

Dad was just 17 in 1945. My American kids were going to the senior prom at 17, applying for college, enjoying their independence at friends’ parties, and looking forward to a long, prosperous, and secure life. But Thomas was just looking at surviving another day. Can you imagine? Food, water, and a roof over his head – those were his concerns at 17.

In the summer of 1945, we began the process of adjusting to life under Russian occupation.

The initial disappointment over not being liberated, but rather very much occupied, soon gave way to a new resignation. The political conditions were pretty much unchanged; only the polarity was reversed. What had been the far right had flipped to the far left. Now, instead of Bolsheviks being the bad guys, it was the Junkers, the aristocratic landowners. They hardly existed any more in 1945, especially not in Saxony, but they provided a good target. In order to build a new system, like a “Workers’ and Peasants’ State,” one has to provide an enemy. Besides, the Junkers were the best rationale for the land reform in which every land holding, even a modest farm, was classified as a “Junker’s estate” and was nationalized and made a part of a collective farm.

It wasn’t entirely unrealistic of the Russians to expect that in Chemnitz, of all places, Communist ideas would find fertile ground. Chemnitz had never been very sophisticated, but rather was a busy smokestack town, a center of machine tool and textile industries - exactly the reason my grandparents and father had settled there as a banker.

It was the kind of place where the proud emotion of socialism runs deep. That is why of all German cities, Chemnitz would eventually be picked to have its name changed to “Karl-Marx-Stadt.” Not because Chemnitz ever had anything to do with Karl Marx, but rather that it was considered a worthy place for that name of honor.

Chemnitz seems to have always been a politically charged city. In August 2018, less than a year after my amazing trip to Chemnitz, riots broke out there after a German citizen was killed by Iraqi and Syrian immigrants. In response, mass protests against immigration were ignited by groups of German civilians. Many were not surprised that this happened in Chemnitz where right-wing German nationalists are especially prevalent. In fact, protests to “denounce immigrants” apparently still happen in Chemnitz now, on a weekly basis.

Dad never spoke of Chemnitz in glowing terms. I wonder what he’d think of it now. Hopefully he’d denounce the strong anti-immigrant movement there now – though, to be honest, I’m just not absolutely sure.

(But in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 76% of the inhabitants voted to change the name back to Chemnitz!)

Amazingly, even under the “reversed political polarity,” German bureaucracy survived - and even flourished - in Russian-occupied Chemnitz. That’s how it was designed. The procedures and the paperwork of the highly efficient Nazi machine remained essentially the same, and in fact not much different from pre-Nazi Germany. The most visible difference was that on the endless stamps, seals, and forms, the Reichsadler (an eagle with a swastika in its claws, now called Pleitegeier — “bankruptcy vulture”!) was now obsolete. The civil servants who staffed the bureaucratic offices were not important enough to be removed, and the new bosses - now likely to be survivors of concentration camps rather than, as before, Nazis too old to be in the army - were glad to rely on the routines entrenched in the bureaucracy to provide a semblance of order in the chaos.

Of course, even red tape had to be adjusted. Instead of specific ration cards for specific foods — fats, meat, bread, etc. — there were now cards with numbers only. Depending on local supply, each coupon had a declared value, publicized on the Bürgermeister’s bulletin board, and from there by word of mouth. On Friday, for example, coupon “June E-4” would be good for 250 grams of brown sugar or molasses and “K-3” — only children got it — would buy a liter of milk. When word got out, members of the household (usually children) would take turns waiting for the store to open, and those who were not in line by 6 AM were often left holding worthless ration coupons because the supply had run out.

The main staple, the pillar of existence, was the potato. Potatoes were served in every conceivable form (and in some barely conceivable forms).

The recipe for Fitzfädelsuppe (loosely translatable as “can-of-worms soup”), the staple, went like this:

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add salt. Grate three raw potatoes into the boiling water, using a grater to make long strings. When strings are done, serve.

Or another favorite — potato pancakes:

Press out grated potatoes through a cloth. Collect the settled starch on the bottom of the liquid for soup. Moisten the pan with Ersatzkaffee and spread the dry grated potatoes on it. Fry.

With recipes like this, no one needed to spend long hours preparing a family meal. What took the time and effort was procuring the ingredients.

Starting with the water. Since some of the water reservoirs and much of the supply routes were destroyed, water was a very serious problem and a rare commodity. Luckily, Försterstraße had its own deep well shaft, a leftover from the days when this suburb had been a farm. Luckier still, it was located right across the street from our house. Several times a day, I would take the bucket with a long rope to get water. The well was deep, and there was a trick to filling the bucket: you had to leave the rope completely slack, then drop the bucket upside-down, all the way down the center of the shaft. If it hit the wall or the rope got tangled, it would turn right-side-up and would end up floating helplessly on the water, so you’d have to start all over again. Once carried home, the drinking water had to be boiled, of course, which easily could take several hours because if there was gas at all, the pressure was usually so low that there was hardly a flame.

The ration cards, too, were not always free; often they were issued only in exchange for performing community service. There was virtually no farm machinery available due to the complete lack of fuel, and the only field help available to farmers were undernourished horses and oxen or equally starved people from the community, pressed into service by conscription.

In the city itself, the main chore in exchange for ration cards was brick cleaning - clearing away the unimaginable mountains of rubble (almost five million cubic yards of it) by separating remnants of burned-out houses — whole city blocks of multi-story apartment houses — into cleaned, reusable bricks in one pile and unusable rubble in another. It seemed that, for months on end half the population did nothing else.

In researching this and looking for an applicable photo, I learned that much of this work was done by women – “Trummerfrauen,” or “rubble women”!

        

 

And here is a whole library of 7,348 photos of Germany in 1946, portraying, in ways words alone never could, the struggles my father speaks of here.

In the village center of Adelsberg, there was a completely intact school building. Parents of the children of Adelsberg arranged for two hours per day of instruction in German, Math, and French. Nora and I felt rather sheepish sitting together in a classroom again, convinced that it was somehow beneath our dignity to be back to such adolescent pursuits as learning vocabulary after all the growing up we had done together. But actually, I rather enjoyed it. I had not been in a classroom for three years, and just being an accepted member of a class again made up for everything else.

One afternoon on the way home from school, the world had a strangeness about it that took us a few moments to understand. The sky was a deep, uniform blue, by all appearances it was a hot midsummer afternoon, except that the sun felt cool, and its light was strangely dimmed, like on a summer day when the sun suddenly disappears behind a flying cloud, but there were no clouds in the sky. Being without newspaper or radio, we did not know that there would be a solar eclipse that day. It was the first one I had ever seen.

Not much later, there was some confusing news: the Americans had dropped some kind of super-bomb on Japan which, it was said, reduced an entire city to nothingness in one instant. It was called an “atomic” bomb.

“Oh my God!” Onkel Heinz exclaimed as he heard it. “Now we are all done for — this is it!” And in a mixture of a then-popular science fiction book called “Atomic Weight 500,” his own partially-digested knowledge of physics, and a mistrust of Americans, he proceeded to predict what will happen next: “Now the radioactivity is going to sink down into the water table, and from there it will spread in a chain reaction to every drop of water in the world through the moisture in the soil, through all the oceans, and up all the rivers, right up into our own well across the street. Now we’ve had it!” And he paced back and forth, hands clutched behind his back, his forehead in deep furrows.

Yes, in 1945 people must have been pretty sure the world was coming to an end. Most of Germany was completely destroyed, other European countries suffered major destruction as well, and now two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been completely leveled. Millions of people had been killed in all these acts of war. Would anything ever feel normal and whole again?