A Guest of the Reich by Peter Finn

Author:Peter Finn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

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At the lakeside villa, Gertie was mostly surrounded by true believers who had absorbed (or at least appeared to have) the relentlessly promulgated Nazi line that German retreats on both fronts were temporary setbacks. Beattie also said the people he encountered in Berlin “live[d] in a strange world of fears and fantastic hopes.” The Russians, they believed, had stalled out on the Reich’s eastern border, while the Allies, should they attempt to cross the Rhine, would be wading into a bloodbath—reminiscent of World War I’s Verdun or the Somme—as they encountered Germany’s stoutest defenses.

“They were convinced of an ultimate German victory, even if it took two years to win it,” Gertie noted. “Only in Berlin did I find such confidence and assurance. Elsewhere, soldiers and civilians alike put up a token show of diluted patriotism, but they were like small boys whistling in the dark to keep up their courage.”

On her second night at the house, when the air raid sirens began to howl, Gertie and the others rushed to a bunker in the garden, about forty feet from the building. They went down a narrow passage paneled with pine to a stuffy underground room. Gertie thought it was a death trap and that the villa’s cellar would have been much safer. She came to dread the time spent in the shelter—during the day when the American bombers came, at night when the British struck. Gertie had a fear of being enclosed underground. She could tolerate a small cell—or a night in a hunting blind—if there was a window to allow in daylight or see the stars, but she found the claustrophobia of bomb shelters unbearable.

Sitting in the semidarkness, she could feel the concussion from the bombs exploding in the city. After raids, the garden was littered with slivers of silver tinfoil, dropped by the Allied planes as they approached Berlin to confuse German radar systems. One day, Gertie saw “two of our planes destroyed” and “nose dive to earth in black smoke,” though some of the crew appeared to escape as two parachutes were visible in the sky. For the most part, southwestern Berlin was not a target of the Allied attacks, but there was still visible damage from errant bombs—some destroyed villas, broken roof tile and shards of glass in the gutters, and big craters in the woods.

On December 5, the city witnessed a massive daytime raid by the U.S. Army Air Forces, with the distant murmur of up to five hundred B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators, accompanied by groups of fighters, becoming a wall of noise as the planes approached. “All traffic had stopped, even to the subways, and the whole city was under cover,” Beattie wrote. “As the bombs struck in thick swarms, the ground even here on the southern edge of the city shook and shuddered. In the northern distance, we could see the great columns of smoke and dust billow up and then stretch out eastward in a heavy pall over the whole city.

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