The Other Side of Silence

I always loved Konigsberg. The capital of East Prussia, it was a beautiful old city and, in many ways, very like Berlin. My mother was from Konigsberg, and when I was a child, we used to go there to visit her parents, who ran a Viennese-style cafe and confectionery near the Kaiser Bridge, and occasionally, to take a beach holiday at the nearby seaside town of Cranz. But most of all I remember the Konigsberger Zoo in the Tiergarten, which was one of the best in Europe and I can still recall, aged four, riding on the back of the elephant and seeing the bears. The bear pit at the zoo was even bigger and better than the one in Berlin. My grandfather owned a Mercedes-Benz-one of the first cars in Konigsberg-and, to me, riding in the back of that car was almost as good as riding on the back of the elephant. Until they lost everything in the inflation of 1923 my grandparents were reasonably well off, I think. My grandmother was a good woman, always helping other people. There was a Jewish convalescent home in Luisenthal where she often took unsold cakes from the cafe and I used to wonder why it should have been this place that should receive her charity. Now I know why; she was herself half-Jewish. Much later, in 1919, my first wife and I went there on our honeymoon and we stayed in my grandparents’ villa on the Upper Pond, which seemed to us like the last word in gracious living. We must have visited every attraction the city had to offer, including the Amber Museum-Konigsberg is famous for its German gold, as amber is sometimes called-the Prussia Museum, and the zoo, of course, but mostly we just sat in the front garden and stared out at the pond. It was a very happy time for me. The war was over and I was still alive, with all my limbs intact, and in love. My wife adored the place and for a while we even thought about living there. In retrospect, I wish we had. Maybe she would have been spared the influenza that killed her not long afterward. The flu wasn’t as bad in Konigsberg as in Berlin. Fewer people to spread it, probably; there were only three hundred thousand people living there in the twenties, as opposed to the four million in Berlin.

My being sent to Konigsberg in 1944 was supposed to be a punishment and feel like an exile from Berlin, but to me it felt like I was almost going home, especially as, until that summer, the city and most of East Prussia had been largely untouched by the war. As things turned out it was perhaps fortunate I was away from Berlin and out of anyone’s mind when Count von Stauffenberg made his failed attempt at a coup in July 1944, otherwise I might have been swept up in the wave of executions that followed. More than a hundred kilometers to the southeast of Konigsberg, Hitler came on German radio and announced he was alive, and if anyone was there to witness a demonstration of loyalty and affection-but only if they were-people breathed a great sigh of relief.

I was a lowly lieutenant, an officer attached to the 132nd Infantry Division and the FHO-the branch of German military intelligence responsible for the Eastern Front-and it was my job to help make meaningful assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions, and communicate these with the army commanders on Paradeplatz. Those assessments were very simple: The Red Army was poised to annihilate us.

As an officer I was entitled to a room at the Park Hotel, on Huntertragheim Street and close to the Lower Pond. Built in 1929, the Park was the last word in modern luxury; at least it was until almost two hundred RAF Lancaster bombers turned up on two consecutive nights at the end of August 1944 and bombed the city to bits. Almost every building to the south of Adolf-Hitler-Platz, including the famous castle and the cathedral where Kant was buried, were destroyed or damaged. Thirty-five hundred people were killed and tens of thousands made homeless-a foretaste of the terrible fate that was soon to befall Berlin. The upper floors of the Park Hotel and many of the men living on them disappeared in fire and smoke, but the second floor I lived on was spared and somehow the restaurant next door survived, too, which was just as well as it was one of the few places where German officers were allowed to take girls from the women’s auxiliary services who, even in 1944, were sometimes strictly chaperoned.