Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945

Ian Buruma was personally invested in writing Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945. His interest in wartime Berlin stemmed from his father’s experience as a Dutch forced laborer in Germany’s capital from 1943 to 1945.

Leo Buruma, whose mother was Jewish, was a law student in German-occupied Holland when he was compelled to work in a factory that manufactured brakes and machine guns. Leo, a keen observer of his surroundings, compiled his vivid impressions of Berlin in letters. His son would find them in a tin box. As Buruma states in the introduction, Leo’s observations inspired him to write this splendid book, which is published by Penguin Press.

Buruma, a professor at Bard College in New York state, explores Berlin year by year from the beginning to the end of World War II. During this tumultuous period, this bustling city of 4.3 million was incrementally destroyed by U.S. and British air raids. Buruma documents its piecemeal destruction in a calm and measured style. He includes the fate of Berlin’s persecuted Jewish residents in his lucid narrative.

He is not a detached observer. His disdain for the Nazi regime is palpable. Nevertheless, his account of Berlin is credible and balanced. As he states, Germany’s invasion of Poland, which set off the war, did not arouse the “stormy enthusiasm” reported in the Nazi press. The patriotic fervor that Germans had displayed in the early stages of World War I was absent. Instead, the atmosphere on September 1, 1939 was dominated by “glum indifference” and “tense foreboding.”

For Berlin’s remaining 80,000 Jews, who already had been deprived of German citizenship and consigned to sordid flats known as “Jew houses,” the situation was far more uncertain. Subjected to discriminatory laws and edicts, they were pariahs. Buruma devotes a considerable chunk of his book to their plight.

By the outbreak of the war, roughly half of Berlin’s Jewish population of 160,000 had emigrated, leaving behind Jews who had been unable to acquire foreign visas, Jews married to gentiles, and Jews of partial Jewish extraction, or mischlings.

Until October 1941, the Nazi regime encouraged Jewish emigration, but most countries had closed their borders to Jews. Shanghai was the only place where a visa was not required. Consequently, thousands of German, Austrian, Czech and Polish Jews fled to this Chinese city, which was controlled by Japan, a German ally.

The anxiety displayed by Berliners in the first days of the war vanished when most of them returned to their jobs and routines and life appeared relatively normal on the surface. Beneath the artificial normality, Berliners coped with the hardships of a war economy. Top wage earners were heavily taxed. Food, clothes and other necessities could be bought only with ration coupons. Gasoline stations no longer sold gas to ordinary motorists.

In 1940, cinemas and theaters were temporarily closed. Yet Berliners never lost their taste for movies, some of which were escapist tales of romance set in the 19th century. Many of the biggest stars, like Heinz Ruhmann and Ferdinand Marian, lived in Berlin. They were not Nazis, but were tainted by Nazism. Marian, whose first wife was a Jewish pianist, appeared in the antisemitic film Jew Suss.

The first major British air raid on Berlin occurred on September 26, 1940, when more than 100 Royal Air Force bombers struck, inflicting relatively minor damage. German newspapers gave it very little coverage, while foreign correspondents were forbidden to report the details. As the war progressed, Berlin was bombed with greater ferocity. The RAF’s commander, Arthur Harris, believed that saturation bombing would knock Germany out of the war.

By 1941, Wehrmacht casualties had skyrocketed to almost one million soldiers, a figure that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was loath to publicize.

Food was not plentiful. By 1942, Berliners had to subsist on a bland diet of bread, cabbage and potatoes. Meat and butter were scarce. On the black market, however, high-priced sausages, hams, bacon and coffee could be purchased.

With Goebbels’ announcement of “total war” in 1943, bars, beauty parlors and upscale restaurants were shuttered, adding to the city’s jittery mood. Only cinemas remained open, allowing Berliners to watch a parade of mostly kitschy films. American movies were popular, but a film starring a Jewish actor, such as Hedy Lamarr or Sylvia Sidney, was removed from circulation.

Even as Nazi Germany was collapsing, Goebbels commissioned extravagant new films like Munchhausen and Kolberg, which was directed by Veit Harlan, the director of Jew Suss.

Buruma describes these events colorfully and comprehensively, enveloping a reader in the rich tapestry of his story.

Toward the final years of the war, nearly seven million foreign workers were employed in German industry and agriculture. Treated inhumanely, almost two-and-a-half million of them perished.

Jews in Berlin lived from day to day, never being sure what lay ahead. Starting in September 1941, they were obliged to wear a distinctive yellow star on their clothes. From the Grunewald station, thousands of Jews were deported to ghettos and concentration camps in Latvia and Poland, where they would be murdered or die of hunger and disease.

When the movie star Joachim Gottschalk was told that his Jewish wife and their son would be deported to a camp in Czechoslovakia, they committed suicide.

Forty thousand Jews were still in Berlin in 1942, much to Goebbels’ chagrin. He was determined to remove all of them as quickly as possible. When he ordered the deportation of a substantial number of Jewish workers from factories in Berlin, their Christian wives staged noisy public protests, forcing the regime to cancel the order. Buruma believes that around 9,000 Jews in mixed marriages hung on and were able to survive.

Still other Jews, known as U-boats, went into hiding, often aided by gentile friends and acquaintances. Less than 2,000 managed to survive, the others having been denounced by Gestapo spies, some of whom were Jewish.

Even as Allied armies approached Berlin, the German fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, refused to surrender, being convicted that his regime would miraculously prevail. He warned Germans that Germany’s defeat would mean the extermination of the German people.

With Berlin mercilessly bombed in the last few months of the war, Berliners hunkered down in basements, bomb shelters, bunkers and trenches. When the Red Army reached the center of the city, near Hitler’s bunker, it was met by 40,000 German troops and an equal number of volunteers assisted by Hitler Youth. During the street battles, roughly 100,000 civilians were killed.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 women in Berlin were raped. “Brutalized by battle, enraged by what the Germans had done to them, and filled with sheer bloodlust encouraged by their leaders, Soviet soldiers took out all their worst impulses on German women,” Buruma writes.

Berlin bounced back from the rubble and the ashes and was systematically rebuilt. Buruma clearly admires its resiliency and its success in becoming one of Europe’s most vibrant cultural centers. “The city has revived, to be sure, with a bracing youthful energy … But what is most remarkable about Berlin is the way it has dealt with the past …”

There are countless “stumbling stones” bearing the names of deported Jews on pavements in front of buildings where they once lived. There are monuments attesting to the Holocaust. And in the heart of Berlin, there is the monumental Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

As Buruma eloquently writes, “The city itself is a monument, not only to man’s blackest depravity, but to its capacity to be reborn and live again.”

With this this eloquent observation, he summarizes the story of Berlin from 1939 to 1945.