Solitary Spy by Boyd Douglas

Author:Boyd, Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750982900
Publisher: The History Press

11

EXTRA-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

Although our work required intense concentration, the free time afforded by the shift system also gave time for exploring the beautiful woodland along the shores of the Havel, hidden in which were idyllic small, old-fashioned guest houses where elderly Berliners still came for holidays in an atmosphere so different from the city centre, which had been largely flattened by American carpet bombing and was noisy with the machines involved in its reconstruction. If we wanted to go into town, two bus rides from the gate of the camp brought us to what had been Adolf-Hitler-Platz, renamed Reichskanzlerplatz,1 on which the British Naafi Club was an imposing six-storey modern concrete building with its own cinema showing English-language films. Outside it patrolled a squadron of sex workers, whom we were warned not to touch with the proverbial barge pole unless we wanted to catch an unpleasant and embarrassing disease, although every public gents’ toilet had a slot machine dispensing Männerschutze – condoms – which were far more difficult for young men to obtain in Britain. Standing outside the Naafi club, one could see all the way down the Kaiserdamm to the Brandenburg Gate, 2 miles distant. With barely a single entire building left standing, in terms of devastation the view more resembled Hiroshima after the bomb than anything we had ever seen in Europe.

After fighting ceased on 8 May 1945 the 2.8 million women, children and very old men who survived from Berlin’s pre-war civilian population of 4.3 million called their city ‘die Geisterstadt’ – ghost town. People continued to die at the rate of 4,000 per day from starvation and epidemics of cholera and diphtheria. To gain ration cards from the Soviet interim administration, it was necessary for people to work. All women between the ages of 15 and 65 were conscripted as Trümmerfrauen – rubble women – who faced the impossible task of sorting through 75 million tons of rubble to save bricks or anything else recyclable and shovel the rest into wheelbarrows for removal by horse and cart, and later trucks. There was no protective clothing; they worked, come wind, come rain, without gloves in whatever blouses, dresses and skirts they had been able to salvage from the debris of their homes.

Much of this debris was used to construct an artificial hill in the British sector, dubbed der Teufelsberg, or Devil’s Hill, because of the origin of the rubble. Other destroyed German cities had their own devil’s hills, but this one was the largest, reaching 400ft high. The site was chosen because American engineers were unable to demolish by explosives Albert Speer’s reinforced concrete staff college there, and deemed it simpler to bury the buildings and dispose of the rubble at the same time. When we reached Berlin, the hill, known as ‘America’s Big Ear’, was crowned by aerials of our US opposite numbers, using the height to increase the range of their snooping on Warsaw Pact traffic. To gain a little extra height, the American base included

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