Silent Berliners See March Of Victors

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 161, 10 July 1945, Page 4

Silent Berliners See March Of Victors

Special to the Auckland .!■ BERLIN, July 4.., THE end of the long road—a road which led through deserts and over mountains and seas, in the black depression of defeat and the flush of victory—was reached in this morning's rainy dawn. The vanguard of the unit, which claims the proudest record of the British Army, General Lyne's "desert rats," entered the . ruined city of Berlin. Veterans of battles, who bled Hitler's finest army white on the sands of Africa, and swept on to victories in Tripoli, Tunis, France and the Lowlands, entered the enemy's capital without celebration or ceremony. They entered as prosaically as if the move, which drove the final symbolic nail in the coffin of the Third Reich, was just another field exercise. With them elements of America's crack 22nd Armoured Division took stations in the zones allotted to the control of the British and American occupation armies. Tonight, Berlin's shivering and hungry crowds see the uniforms of all three great victors in the streets of a city which is little better than a graveyard of a deluded people's hopes, and the graveyard of tens of thousands of men, women and children who died in the most nor- , rible holocaust in war's history. This afternoon I drove through Berlin, and I do not think there is much more to see of what has befallen the German people. It has been a long wait to see the entry of the Western Allies into Berlin. The war has been over nearly two months and beyond the political implication of .a shared victory and a shared responsibility which the occupation makes, it did not really matter much whether we came or not. But I think the wait was worth it. Now I can really believe that the European war is over. I have seen the picture of Stalin bedecked with Red flags standing at the Brandenburger Gate and had an oily German say to me, "He's very handsome." I have seen the gaunt, blackened ruin of the Reichstag and the filthy rubble of the Tiergarten bunker, where they say Hitler and his mistress died and were burned. I had seen many battles and many ruined cities, but here was the epitome of them all—a place where ghosts walked abroad in daylight, accusing the past and challenging the future.

The violence of Berlin's death flurry must have been something defying imagination. I drove for miles through the suburbs and the city which had been pulverised by enormous bombs and gutted by fires which the Germans say were so fierce they suffocated hundreds to death by the exhaustion of oxygen.

But these ruins were no different from the ruins of a score of other German cities. Not even in the massive sweep of the Unter den Linden could a spectator pause and see more than a vista of ruin as narrow as a narrow street.

Like Scene Iα Moon From the Brandenburger Gatfr— —scarred by flying steel, until even its massiveness has a queer hazy look—one can look into the very heart of the city. It is a heart most horribly dead and as unreal as a lunar landscape. The melted dome of the Opera House has run like tinsel in a match flame, with gaping holes exposing the broken supports.

Star—By OSMAR WHITE JL - The Reichstag is battered into a shapeless mass, but, like the Brandenburger Gate, its shapelessness retains a suggestion of what it once was, a suggestion more admonitory by far than its total destruction could have been. Under the eastern wall, where Soviet soldiers scrawled in charcoal and red chalk, their names, units and revolutionary slogans, lie the contorted wrecks of Tiger tanks. Here and there among piles of powdered brick men have marked death with crude wooden crosses. Death must have swept the heart of Berlin like the thundrstorm which swept it, while I looked this afternoon. No stones are unc/iipped by bullets or shrapnel, no ruin of a wall still standing has not. been licked by fire. Only the golden eagles of the Reich Chancellery will scream dumbly from nitches on the crumbled wall which fronts the Wilhelmstrasse. The green trees of the great Tiergarten have been lopped and splintered by shell fire, its once smooth lawns littered with soot and bloodstaned garbage. The city skyline is a lacy frieze of ruin, on which the scored brick gleams palely when a burst of sunlight strikes it. Winds that blow the obliterated streets are full of the smell -»of quenched fire and death, for, thousands of bodies lie under the wreckage of the walls, crushed, burned or ' sealed forever in buried cellars. Such a city should be deserted, but the most macabre thing about it is that it is crowded. It is crowded with people who have no .work to do but to shovel what is left of their homes into neat piles, willing them back with broken stones. They walk with the German primness on wet streets, hurrying;, nowhere. They stand"in long'dratr queues for Tb'read and potatoes': or.; a, meagre measure of milk for their pale children. ; Many of them are still searching hopelessly, or hopefully, according to the fibre of their minds, and temperaments, for family, or friends, or lovers lost in a jungle of destruction. God alone knows what the end of each search will be. Moving among them, threading their way in a ma z e of streets from which not only the landmarks but even the street signs have gone, one meets strange integers in the multiple equation of tragedy.

Who Will Be Next? Within an hour I had talked to an English-speaking waiter who once had a job in a fashionable London hotel, and who said of his own countrymen: "Yesterday they were for Hitler. To-day they are for themselves. To-morrow they may be for Stalin. Who knows? They are not to be trusted." And I talked with a Dutchman and his wife who had been in the Saxenhausen camp and had been forced to work in an aircraft factory under heavy bombing for two years. The man was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis, but his wife clung pitifully to his thin arm. They intended walking all the way to Amsterdam, if necessary. I talked with a German Jew who was eyeing the Chancellery's eagles sombrely. He said that his mother, fattier and two sisters had been "exterminated" at Dachau. He did not know Avhat he would do or what there was to do in such a world. I talked with a woman whose eyes sparkled with fear, hate and malicious hope as she complained that the Russians had stolen her clothing to send home.

When I came back to my billet in the Schlactenesee district, where at least half the houses are habitable, waiting there was a pale-faced German girl who had walked 70 miles to come to live with an aunt at that address, but nobody in the house had heard of the aunt s name. The girl said quietly, with stony eyes, "Now I have no work, no food and no money. Aunt was my only hope. I will go and look for her. She walked away into the evening. This is that Berlin to which the grim-faced Desert Rats came this morning, and to which they are still coming, along the roads and through the German cornfields, under a stormy sky. . This is the Berlin to which long columns of American trucks, tanks and guns are coming. This is the Berlin where the Russians have for two months known what it is to be conquerors and to be revenged. To-night the broken and deformed city sleeps—if sleep it can.