Читаем Berlin полностью

The plenum meetings at the Potsdam Conference took place in a mock-Tudor palace called Cecilienhof, which had been built between 1911 and 1916 for Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and his wife, Cecilia. Its front garden now featured a giant star of red geraniums—a none-too-subtle symbol of the Soviets’ proprietary attitude. The long-winded discussions in that gloomy building could hardly have discouraged the Russians in their ambitions for Germany and Berlin. The Potsdam Agreement essentially confirmed the earlier accords, which placed east-central Europe in the Soviet sphere of interest. Poland, still occupied by the Red Army, was given a new western border on the Oder/Western Neisse Rivers, which put Moscow in effective control of the coal-rich Silesian region, whose former German residents, expelled by the Poles, joined the vast stream of refugees flowing west. While postulating “uniformity of treatment of the German population throughout Germany,” the agreement allowed the occupation powers to extract reparations from their zones according to their individual needs. In exchange for shipping food and raw materials to western Germany, Russia was promised 65 percent of the industrial goods in the western zones and another 10 percent free of charge. In accepting these arrangements the Western negotiators unwittingly set the stage for the long-term division of Europe and Germany.

Cecilienhof, site of the Potsdam Conference, 1945

France was not invited to the Potsdam Conference—a reflection, Paris believed, of the Big Three’s failure to appreciate the importance of its contribution to the German defeat. But in fact the Anglo-Americans had already decided at Yalta to grant France a role in the postwar administration of Germany, and zones of occupation in western Germany and Berlin had been set aside for her. The British and Americans later had occasion to regret their generosity, for France turned out to be almost as hard to work with as Russia, saying an obstructive non to every effort to govern Germany as one unit.

A Berlin woman returning to the city after a successful scavenging trip to the countryside

Assessing the difficulties of the Allied administration of Germany, one British military government officer observed: “The world has never known before a situation in which four peoples lived and tried to cooperate in a country inhabited by a fifth.” The challenge was even greater in the relatively confined space of a single city—and a wrecked city at that. The interallied agency established to oversee the administration of Berlin was the Kommandatura, which was composed of the four Stadtkommandanten, or city commanders. At its very first meeting on July 11, 1945, the Soviet representative announced that the Russian zone would not be able to send any food to the western sectors. This move was especially pernicious given the existence of widespread hunger and Berlin’s dependence on supplies from its agricultural hinterlands. In desperation, Berliners bartered precious household goods for comestibles. It was rumored that some farmers now covered the floors of their cow sheds with Persian carpets. However, as in the First World War, city folk often stole what they wanted, thereby rekindling old hostilities between capital and countryside.