Empire: World History - 261. Race To Berlin 1945: A Devastated City Divided (Ep 1)

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

What was life like in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War? Why did the Red Army steal taps from Berlin houses when they reached the city? Was the famous photo of the red flag on the Reichstag staged or authentic? Anita and William are joined by Giles Milton, author of Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World, to discuss the division and destitution of the capital city after the Second World War.  ----------------- Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com.  ----------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunpool. Don't pretend that's how you talk. That is not how you talk. Just explain. I should explain this.

Turn my volume down. It was booming. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? Unbelievable. And on a sound check, William will suddenly assume the aspect of whispering Bob Harris, as if any of us believe that's how he talks. And then yank up his volume. Anyway, look, last time we were with you, we went into some may say excruciating detail of the Yalta conference, the psycho drama that was Yalta. But honestly, I hope you've got some impression of how just that image of unity and that photograph that everybody's come to know from Yalta is just not what was going on around the table as the big three went behind each other's backs, issued nebulous statements which would be questioned and then ripped to shreds

in no time at all, and how this whole idea that Roosevelt had of winning the war, yes, but also winning the peace, is built on straw. And we're going to find out actually how this plays out in the flesh with our very special guest. He's excellent, you've met him before on Empire Podcast, Charles Milton, author of Checkmate in Berlin, is with us. And you met last time when he was talking about Paradise Lost, the Smyrna episode that we did. Jars, it's so good to have you back on, Empire. Thank you. One of our best ever. I love that episode. Very nice to be back. Well, thank you very much. It feels like I'm going from one catastrophe to another one. That's the history of the 20th century for you. It's hilarious. Yeah, so we're talking about something really bleak. Who are you going to call, Giles Milton? So, welcome. Thank you.

Just on that analysis, I mean, just it's a very flimsy analysis of Yalta. But in a nutshell, what do you think of that conference? Was it, as Eastern Europe believes and says very openly, a complete betrayal? Or was it the best that three men with very differing agendas could do to bring about the end of a war? When the Soviets had already conquered half of Europe and weren't going to be going in retreat? Well, you've put your finger on it there, really, because I think all three of them came a world. thinking they got a really good deal. They came away very optimistic. They issued these wonderful sort of flowery statements about how this is the new future of the world begins here.

But unfortunately, of course, for the Western powers, is that Stalin's Red Army is in control of most of Eastern Europe, most of Central Europe, the Baltic states, Poland, and is, you know, on the brink of breaking into Germany. So frankly, you know, you only have to look at the map of the period and realize that Stalin has effectively got everything he wants already. And this is going to set the scene for the future and everything that's going to unroll in Germany and in Berlin. Charles, before we even enter Berlin or develop this any further, you have been to Yalta, haven't you? And when you could go and visit as a tourist, was it preserved that whole scene and the three palaces? And what did you see? What was there to look at?

Yeah, the conference room where they met, it's sort of preserved in Aspec. It's exactly as it was in February 1945. You walk into the room, only the big players are missing. The city itself, of course, has rebuilt. It was incredibly badly damaged by the Germans. They'd left it in ruins. I mean, you've probably touched on this, but for the Yalta Conference, Stalin and his team

had to fly in absolutely everything, you know, and restore these three palaces for the three delegations. I do remember one slightly striking image, which I took a photo of. I don't think I was the first. When I was there, there was a huge statue of Lenin that towered over everything with his arm outstretched, pointing directly towards a brand-new McDonald's that had been built there. Wonderful image.

Is it the same statue, the one where he's sort of pointing to the Finland station? I think so, yeah. I think they produced quite a lot of them, you know, and stuck them up all over the place. Oh, that's a genius story. Jars, do you think that had Churchill and Roosevelt had more of a united front, that they could have extracted more from the Russians and that the board, orders of Eastern Europe could have been changed at all? Or do you think it was a fat accompli before they ever landed for the conference? They possibly could have done. But what shocked

me throughout reading, you know, about this period and about the characters is how much Roosevelt and Churchill were scoring points off each other. They were trying to buddy. Yes, that's the impression that comes across. Yeah. Buddy up to Stalin. I slagging each other off. I just play it by being mean about each other. They were slagging each other off. But also, you know, oh, Stalin's my best mate. No, he's my best mate. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. And one of the most extraordinary things I read was when Roosevelt said to Stalin, you know, the problem of British India, he said, why don't the two of us sort this out without Winston being there? So you have this, this is not a united front on the part of the Western

Allies by any stretch of the imagination. Roosevelt, of course, detest the British Empire and everything about it. And so I think Stalin knew this, realized this, used it to his advantage. And of course, one of the great sort of stories that runs throughout the war is that the the diplomats and bureaucrats in Whitehall and Washington, for far too long, they dismissed Stalin as a sort of, you know, drunken, wistral gangster. What they didn't realize, it was, he was unbelievably shrewd political operator, manipulator, and was constantly getting the better of them. And you hear this sort of despairing cry for the diplomats in Moscow saying, take this guy seriously or he's going to get everything he wants at the end of the war. And they don't, I think. And that's one

the fundamental problems. Charles, today the British often have a very romanticised and exaggerated idea about what we'd still call the special relationship, which often doesn't play out in real time, as we're seeing every day with Trump. Do you think that the same has been projected back onto Yalta, that it's British historians longing to see Yelta as the Allies against Stalin, when in actual fact it's three different powers very much following their own interests, and Roosevelt with absolutely no intention of helping Churchill get his war aims sorted at all, particularly Poland. I think that's absolutely right. And this is what stored up enormous problems for the future, which we're going to see unfolding in Berlin. Yeah, there was no unanimity between Roosevelt and Churchill.

And remember, and this is an important point, Roosevelt was dying at the outer conference. Everyone who saw him thought he looked absolutely terrible. He was so ill that, you know, he had to have one session of the conference. He was in his bed, lying in his bed. with the delegates around him. And Churchill himself was old, he was tired, he was drinking far too much, as one of his AIDS, senior aides said, you know, I do wish he'd stop drinking bucketfuls of Caucasian champagne. He was badly briefed. He didn't read his briefs. And so I think for Stalin, the ultimate manipulator, it was a gift which he exploited to the hilt. And you've got people in Churchill's own delegation who are describing a blustering fool who they cringe every time he's,

stands up, he talks far too long, he talks too loudly, and often what he says doesn't make sense. So to me, you know, you've got three parties who don't agree. You've got people within their parties who don't believe that they're doing the right thing. And maybe if more people would have questioned Roosevelt on his side, we would have had a stronger American presence at that conference, but they didn't. They were all yes men around him. This is no way to build a piece, is it? I mean, it's just no way to build a piece. Exactly. The other crucial factor, which Sehi Prochie discusses, which I think we haven't perhaps. talked about enough, is the degree to which the Soviets have access to intelligence about the

other side and their negotiating positions. How far do you think it mattered that Burgess had leaked all these documents on one side? And is it Alginen Hess, who is in the American delegation, who's also sending documents to the Soviets? Yeah, I mean, this is a story that runs right through the Big Three alliance throughout the war, that the Soviet intelligence is second to none. They're eavesdropping on everything. They've wired up the American embassy in Moscow. They've wired up the British embassy in Moscow. When Churchill goes to Moscow during the war in 42 and 44, his dature is bugged. So Stalin has a unique really access to intelligence. Of course, he doesn't always act on it. Most famously, he knew or he was told by all his informers and spies that Nazi Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union on the 21st of June 1941.

He didn't believe it. So it was a question always of what you do with that intelligence. But yeah, I think the Soviets were masters of information. And of course, we'll come onto this, I'm sure, when we get to the Potsdam Conference, but the whole issue of the Manhattan Project and Americans plan to build the atomic bomb. Well, we absolutely will. But the last thing that we heard from Yalta is, as they're glad-handing each other, they've managed to get Roosevelt to stay a bit longer than he was going to. He's going to bugger off early. Then he stays. And he's got little medals to give to people saying, thank you very much for having us. We've had a lovely time. And his last words to Stalin are, we will meet again in Berlin. Now, he won't, because as you say,

he dies very soon after Yalta. But let's look at Berlin, because the advance of the Soviets into Berlin is quicker than anyone could have imagined. Can we first of all explain why it was that the Soviets swept through so quickly? And the Allies who were meant to, you know, they were meant to Pinser and meat in the middle, are two months behind. Yes, it's an extraordinary battle that's taking place at the Battle for Berlin. You have millions of troops coming in on a pincer movement from the north and from the south into the completely disintegrating Third Reich. You've got Hitler cowering in his bunker. The thing is falling apart. He's issuing orders to fantasy armies that have been defeated, you know, many, many months before. The place is

imploding and General Zucco, Marshal Zukov and General Konev are advancing. on the city with, you know, literally millions of troops. There's no doubt that they're going to capture the city. Meanwhile, as you say, the Western Allies, the Americans, the Brits, the Canadians and other forces are hundreds of miles away. And there's one sort of very good reason for this. You know, when they landed at D-Day, Berlin was the ultimate goal. It was the glittering prize at the end of the war. A soldier scruled to Berlin on their tanks and jeeps as they, you know, set off across Normandy. But General Eisenhower, and many people see this as a catastrophic decision decides halfway through the advance to Berlin that Berlin is no

longer the ultimate goal, that the ultimate goal for the Western Allies is the total annihilation of the Wehrmacht, of the German Wehrmacht. And this becomes the Allies goal. And I think Stalin probably sitting in the Kremlin thinking, this is my golden moment. This gives me the chance to take control of Berlin and hopefully as much as Germany as I can get my hands on. And so that sort of sets a scene. for what's taking place in April, very beginning of May, 1945, as the war comes to its final days. So what does Eisenhower do? Where does he go when he should be going to Berlin?

They're all obviously generally heading east towards the German frontier, but they're going after the big formations of German troops. This slows them down massively. So, you know, by the time the Soviets are knocking on the gates of Berlin, as Anita said, the Western allies are still some 200 miles west of the city, which is a strategic disaster. Absolutely a strategic disaster, but it is so disastrous for the people of Berlin. Now, first of all, we ought to paint a picture of Berlin.

As you say, it has been bombed to smithereens. People are in a terrible situation, mostly women and children because the men are off fighting. And you have General Zukov, a Marshal Zukov, as you mentioned him, who gives the order to the Red Army, take everything. And what he means when he says take everything, he means take everything from the Western sector. You know, the whole thing that was agreed at Yalta was that they were going to split up Berlin into quadrants. France gets a quadrant after much rowing as well. But he says, go, go to the Western segment, take everything.

Do you understand, Zoukov, everything? If you can't take it, destroy it, but don't leave anything to the Allies, no machinery, not a bed to sleep on, not even a pot to pee in. So you've got the intention of the Soviets who've just sort of shaken hands and made this agreement not very long before, of, you know what, screw them. They're not here. Take it all. Just to paint a little picture of the city, I think, we need to understand that this is a city that's been bombarded by the British Air Force, by the Americans for years. This is a city in absolute ruins, you know, that hardly anything in the centre is standing. There's no electricity. There's no gas. There's no water. There's no government.

There's nothing in the city. There's no men, because all the men are rather conscripted into labour battalions or they're fighting on the front line. So this is a city, in real catastrophe. So as you say, the Soviets sweep into the city, they know that under the agreement struck at Yelta that the Brits and the Americans and later the French are going to get their sectors of Berlin. And they want to take everything they possibly can from those Western sectors. So there are big factories in the Western sectors. And the ones that haven't been hit by Allied bombs are full of machinery. This is stripped bare. You know, the luxury hotels. They're stripped bare. They're taking not just plant machinery, heavy machinery, but they're taking

dishwashers, they're taking everything from, you know, they're even taking taps from people's houses. These young, you know, conscripts from Siberia or the back end of nowhere in Russia are taking home taps to villages which don't even have running water. It's completely absurd, but this is utter frenzy. And I think also these young Soviet conscripts were shocked by the standard of living when they go into these houses, particularly in the suburbs of Berlin, which have been less touched by the bombing rates. They cannot believe, the luxury that Germans are living in, you know. So there's a sense, as you say, the Red Army, senior commanders are issuing instructions to their men, go there, loot, rape, do whatever you

want. You're the victorious power. You deserve to get a reward for what you've done. What do you think is going on, though, in Marshall Zukov's mind, when I can understand in a sense the looting part, but to destroy what you don't take, the idea of deliberately falling out with your allies? I mean, is that part of the plan too, that there's going to be hostility between the West and the Red Army? Zukov all set now to confront the West. Is that part of his battle plan? I think that's already there, that you can already sense on the Soviet side. Look, we've taken control of this city and we're going to do what we can to block the Western allies from coming in. So effectively tear up that agreement we've struck at Yelta. They're still hundreds

of miles away. Let's take control of the city while we can. I think there's one image we ought to talk about because many of your listeners will know it. It's the very famous photo called the Red Flag on the Reichstag. And that photo had been planned for weeks by the photographer Yevgeny Kaldai. He had been struck by the equally famous photo of the Americans raising the stars and stripes over Iwojima, that famous picture of five or six soldiers raising the flag. And that was an iconic photo. And he says, I want to do the same for Berlin. He faced one problem. There was no red flag in Berlin at the time. So he hopped on a flight back to to Moscow, got his uncle to get a big red tablecloth, sew a hammer and sickle onto the tablecloth,

fly back to Berlin, he goes to the Reichstag, grab some soldiers, and takes them up to the roof of the Reichstag and takes this iconic picture, which says exactly what Stalin wants it to say is that we, the Red Army, took Berlin without any help from the Western Allies. There was one slight problem. There was a watch. Oh, God's good. I'm so glad you're going to say, because it's my favourite fact from this photograph. Go on. One slight problem. When the Soviet sensors came to look at this picture, they realised that the soldier holding the flag has got two wristwatches on his left arm. And they realise, of course, he's looted this from some unfortunate Berliner. And so, Evgeny Keldive, the photographer, has to

scratch one of them out. It's so marvellous. They also dark in the skies to make it more dramatic and everything. But the important point of the story is that this photo makes front-page news around the world. It's a fantastic propaganda coup for Joseph Stalin to say, effectively, we won the war without your help. So, I mean, just talking about the looting, and I want to come to the rapes very soon, and spend some time on the kind of sexual violence

that women suffered in Berlin, because it is just so unfathomably awful what happens to them. But just on looting alone, Zukov, it took 83 crates of furniture, paintings, fixtures and fittings to his dasher and to his home in Russia. So the looting was completely wholesale. And we should just say something very briefly about Berlin, because you make this observation in your book, that Berlin, which is going to go through such punishment in the next few years, is not a particularly Nazi city. Now, can you explain that to listeners? It will be surprised

that the place that, you know, Hitler hangs out in is not a particularly Nazi city. It was not a particularly Nazi city, and it was a Hitler himself didn't particularly like, partly because the inhabitants, whenever they'd had elections, before Hitler becomes the Fuhrer, when they'd had elections. In fact, Berlin had very strongly voted against the Nazis. So it wasn't a fanatical Nazi city by any stretch of the imagination, certainly not by the end of 1945, swing of 1945, when the place is in ruins. They've seen the consequences of living in the Nazi capital. Like Trump sitting in the middle of Washington, where half the population of civil servants is

just sacked. Absolutely. One thing on the looting, the other thing, you know, many listeners who've been to Berlin will know Museum Island, that Berlin was, you know, one of the great capitals of Europe, and its museums were stuffed with some of the greatest treasures of Western civilization and indeed other civilizations. And what the Nazis had gathered most of these treasures into what were called flakhtum, which are essentially these huge concrete bunkers, which protected these treasures from the raids by the RAF and the Americans. And so this made it an extremely. handy when the Soviets arrive in the city, they go to the flakhtum, they get their lorries and trains ready, and they simply begin creating up all this stuff and shipping it back to Moscow. This was

looting on a monumental scale. They sent in experts, museum curators from Moscow to Berlin to pick out the choicest works, you know, from Caravaggio's to Van Dykes to Renaissance sculptures, whatever. It all was shipped back to Moscow, the gold of Schleeman's gold from Troy. I mean, an extraordinary Lutigsprit. How does it get back to Berlin? I mean, when you go to Berlin today, as you say, you go to Museum Island and you have Nefertiti, all these wonders from Pergamum, all that stuff. Does that all go to Moscow and come back? It all goes to Moscow. It goes either by Lorry or by train, quite complicated because the gauge of the railways change, so everything has to be unload and reloaded. It's a long process, but it's an extraordinary process because the sheer quantity that goes to

Moscow. And of course, a lot of it will remain in Moscow. In fact, a lot of it is still in Moscow to this day, but a lot of it will remain in Moscow until, in fact, Yeltsin does an agreement with the new German government, and a lot of it comes back at that point. Later as that, I had no idea. Yes, yes. And there are museums in Germany in Berlin where they still have empty cabinet saying the stuff that was in here is still in Moscow. I mean, this is appalling, sort of, you know, the rape of art, but the rape of women, I would suggest is even worse. So there is, it's almost mandated, go and brutalize the women. And there are accounts, you paint them painfully, vividly.

But also, there's a book that I read that completely changed my life. I've never been so horrified by a book. And it was, when I read it, it was by Anonym, Anonymous, Diary of a Woman in Berlin. And it was a woman who was trapped in Berlin at the time that the Red Army swept in. And it talks, and you also talk, of this brutalization on a scale where gang rape is just a pastime. You've got licked up, Soviet soldiers who are on the prow, and they will take any female they can get there. hands on, and whether that is a child of 10 years old or an old woman, you've got mothers stuffing their daughters into crawl spaces in the attics or under floorboards so that they can't

be found. You've got women begging for one commanding officer. You just have me, I will give myself to you. You can do anything you like, but please protect me from your men because they are so savagely, savagely attacked. Can you speak more about that? Because I don't want to skip over it. It's going to be hard to hear, but it's awful. This was Anthony Beaver's great revelation, wasn't it? He found this in the Soviet archives in the late 80s when they were first opened up. I was just saying to Giles, I had the distinct pleasure of having dinner with Anthony the other day, and we were talking about this. And I said, oh, this book, Anthony changed my life. You know, diary of a woman in Berlin. And I started to tell you, he goes, idiot, I wrote the forward for that book.

I was like, oh, forgot that. So yes, he's very well aware of the book. I think rumors of rape had filtered through to Berlin from the conquered territories and Prussia that this was going to happen. So there was a real fear and panic in Berlin at the end of April, 1945, that this was about to be visited on the female population. Of course, as I said earlier, very few males in the city at the time anyway. And then you have the Soviet forces coming in. As you say, they're young, they're conscripts, they're drunk, constantly drunk, they drink anything they can. And they embark on this appalling spree of rape. What really makes it so shocking is they're encouraged by the senior hierarchy of the Red Army, say,

and unleash your anger on the German women. They're yours to be had. So they're being actively encouraged by their senior generals to go and rape the women. And you mentioned, I mean, a woman in Berlin is horrific. It's unsparing in its details because we now know the author was a journalist called Marta Hillers. That came out many years after the book was published. And she describes being raped multiple times. And in the end, she, like a number of many Berlin and women, what they did is they hitched up

with a senior officer simply, one man, simply to avoid them being raped, gang raped, or gang rape, or being many others, yeah. Yeah, 100%. According to the record, some 90,000 German women sought medical assistance having been raped, but that is a figure that dwarfed the number, the sheer number of women who were raped and physically abused. In those few weeks when the Soviet army was in complete control of the capital, there was no restraining factor,

The Western armies were still miles away. They could do whatever they want. Yeah, and they did whatever they wanted. There's also one aspect of this that often we don't talk about, because it should be, the focus should be on those poor, broken women who are so damaged and traumatised. But it's also the men who come back to Berlin because they couldn't protect their wives, their mothers, their daughters.

And so there is such a legacy of utter abject misery in that city. of the women who survive, who are lucky enough to survive, and the men who would say unlucky enough to come back to what they come back to. And that's a huge psychological thing in the country, isn't it? It is. And actually, there's another diary, which is only partially published in English by Ruth Andreas Friedrich, who'd been a resistance worker in the city throughout.

And she describes the German men, the Berlin men, coming back to the city at the end of the war. And they're all their cripples. They're in wheelchairs. They've lost limbs. you know, this is the ultimate vanquished army. And yeah, I think it's not surprising that when the GIs, the Brits come sweep into town, finally when they come into town in July,

that the Berlin women, many of them try and hitch up with these rather glamorous sort of Hollywood superstars who sweep into town, if only also to get protection against the Red Army monsters that they've had to deal with for the previous six weeks. And is there anything to eat at this point? I mean, how are people surviving in terms of food and water and basic sustenance. Very little. People have been cowering their cellars for days and days upon end. As the Red Army gets closer and closer, they can hear the booming guns, they can hear the

rattling tanks coming towards the town. They're in their cellars. I had the account of one chap in his cellar who was so short of water, he ended up sucking water from the radiator pipes in his basement, you know. There's very little food. But I have to say one thing that the Red Army, they do do, once they're in control of the city, they realize this is a total humanitarian catastrophe in the making, and they do start bringing in essential supplies, and they hook up the water supply. So there are at least standpipes in the street. But no, it's an utterly miserable time. As I said, the city is in rubble. Many of the women are drafted. They become what's known as rubble women. They're there with tasked with at least clearing the main thoroughfares. You couldn't even drive a tank through Berlin

by the time the city falls. It's a city in total ruins. And so, That's one of their tasks to do, yeah. One of the things that the Red Army says when actually the Allies come in and see what's been going on is victors are not to be judged. They don't care. They're not shamed. This is just, you know, don't care what you think. This is what we do.

I just wanted just very quickly before we go to the break, and then after the break, I would love you to introduce this to some extraordinary characters in your book. And through the prism of what they do, Hal and Madden Looney, I mean, they're just perfect. They're larger than life. One could say. But I just want to say one thing before we go into the break. We've been very critical, quite rightly, of the Soviet army. But when the GIs come, I mean, there are question marks over their conduct as well,

because there is a non-fratonisation clause that is issued to the GIs in particular, and they're very strict about it. I think the Americans are more strict than the British or may have it the wrong way around. But you can get a fine of $60. But it turns into this shorthand for, if you want to proposition a desperate woman who's really hungry, is the $60 question. They call it that. The $65 question, you would be fined $65 for fraternizing,

for talking to a Berlin girl. And this led to the quip which many GI would slip out and come out of their mouths. They'd say copulation without conversation is not fraternization. And thereby try and avoid the $65 fine. Yeah. I mean, but you do have a then a situation of women who just are hungry, who are willing to go that way because they've got kids. to feed. Sometimes, you know, they've got children at home. You know, they will put up with

behaviour, even from the GIs, that, you know, they are respectable women in Berlin. They are. But they have to, because they have to feed their families, you know. The American GIs sweep into town. You have this image of them as sort of millionaire superstars swanning into town. They're laden with cigarettes. They're laden with chocolate. Remember, the currency is completely shot to pieces. So the black market, everything is done by black market. Everything's done by barter. These guys have access to everything that is need. They can buy anything with their cigarettes and their chocolate, you know. And as you say, these poor Berlin women, often with young children, they're desperate, they're starving and the only way they can get food is to sleep with the Western soldiers.

Yeah. Anyway, let's take a break on that depressing note. But honestly, come back after the break because we have got an absolute feast for you, some of the greatest characters in history. Join us then. So welcome back. So the Allies have just finally driven into Berlin two months late into this devastated city where even the roads are so blocked with rubble that tanks can't get through. And we now have to meet the Allies. Tell us, Giles, who is in charge of the Western sectors. Well, so the Yalta Conference had set out the city is going to be divided, the Soviets get the east, and the West is divided between the Americans, the Brits and the French. Each sector is going to have a commandant, and these commandants are going to have the most extraordinary powers, quite literally the powers of life and death over the people in their various sectors. My favourite is probably the American commandant whose name is Colonel Frank Howling Mad Howley.

Only the Americans could come up with that. It sounds like a Mississippi blues man rather than an army commandant. He commands a unit called A1A1. which is pretty cool as well. He's an out-and-out cowboy, and he sweeps into Berlin. He's got such panache and such style. Well, where's he from? Give him his origin, because I love him more than I can say, but what is his origin story? Because I'm so keen to understand what makes him so unique and steadfast and actually honourable in what he does. But what's his background? What's really strange about, Howley, is, as I say, he's an out-and-out cowboy, except he's a sort of intellectual cowboy. He's

actually studied fine art at the Sorbonne. He speaks a number of foreign languages, and he's been in charge of rather unglamourous. That's the very particular sort of cowboy. A rare vend diagram that has both those things in. But he's had the rather unglamorous task of logistics during the war. So after D-Day, he sweeps into Sherbourg. He runs the city of Sherbourg with great swagger. And then he comes into Paris.

He feeds three million, four million Parisians who are starving once the city's been liberated. Frank Howley is a sort of person who doesn't take no for a. an answer. He doesn't believe in red tape. Basically, he issues orders and he expects everyone else to carry them out. And this is actually going to work extremely well when he comes into Berlin. You need a kind of despot, if you like, to run these individual sectors. They're in chaos, they're in ruins, the place that infrastructure has been completely trashed, you know. But what the other important role is going to have is he's going to have to deal with his Soviet counterpart. And he realizes, I think, right from the beginning, that this is going to be

difficult. He describes the Russia. I've got to read out what he says. This is what he thinks the Russians are going to be like. He says they're big jolly, balalaika playing fellows who drink prodigious quantities of vodka and like to wrestle in the dining room. So that's his idea. When he gets to Berlin, he realizes, hold on a minute, we're up against some seriously devious gangsters here. And he says the only way to deal with gangsters is to treat them like gangsters. And this is going to be the hallmark over the next five years of his rule in Berlin. He's going to treat these so-called Soviet allies as enemy gangsters. So from the very outset, we have tension between the American sector and the Soviet sector. And also, you know, he's a steadfast, an honorable

guy, because there will come a point where the Americans want to pull out, but he won't. He will not leave the people that he's meant to be looking after. And he's got that sort of, I will answer to my principles thing, which is just so extraordinary to find, especially when you're in a chain of command. It makes him a very endearing character. He really cares for the people of Berlin. He has a sense of responsibility that I've been tasked with saving this sector of Berlin and I'm going to do it and I'm not going to ever allow the Soviets, you know, to come into my sector. And so, yeah, he becomes this great protector and he's loved by Berliners who realize that he's standing between them and the possibility of a complete Soviet takeover. Let's talk about the British sector. Brigadier

Robert Looney Hind, I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, Deputy Director of the British Military Government in Berlin. Now, this is an old Rajman who acts like an old Rajman. Just too good to be true this cast list. It can't possibly be true, Jans. He made this all up. They say that he talks to Berliners as if they're like coolies back in India. So give us a portrait of this guy, Looney.

Yeah, Looney has been brought up in, as you say, in British India. I mean, he'd spend his leisure hours playing Polaro's. pig sticking, that sort of thing. He represented Britain at the 1936 Olympics in the polo team, winning the silver medal. And he was obsessed with butterflies and caterpillars. This was his great passion. And actually just a little vignette,

because I think it gives a little mark of the man that when he's giving a battlefield briefing in Normandy at the time of D-Day, he suddenly stops his battlefield briefing and runs over to a branch and plucks a caterpillar off of the branch. And his junior officer says, what the hell are you doing, Looney? And he says, Mike, he says, you can fight a battle every day of your life,

but you might not see a caterpillar like that in 15 years. So this is a guy, he's wonderfully eccentric. He's steeped in British India. And like you say, he's going to rule his sector of Berlin rather as if he's back in the Raj. What do you mean by that? You know, ruling it like in the Raj. Well, they are going to be the dominant force. They're all powerful. They come into the city. They sweep into the leafy suburbs of Berlin and they requisition the biggest mansions, they requisition Mercedes cars, they requisition servants and chauffeurs and what have you. Even, you know, Frank Howling Mad Howley, when he looks at the lifestyle being lived by Brigadier Looney Hind, he just can't believe it, you know. Yeah, and just one thing on there, the Brits more than the Americans,

but they do turf out Berliners from their own home to do this. They're doing, to a much more, you know, smaller extent, what the Berliners have been subjected to by the Soviets, which is, you know, was this your home? Very nice. Get out. You're on the street now. You know, that's what happens for them to have their bases. Yeah, they're totally shameless about this. Literally, people are kicked out with just a moment's notice. And for the Western Allies living in Berlin, this is going to be a life of luxury. It's cocktail parties, it's dinner parties, it's endless food. There's clubs have opened all over, the Roxy Club, you know, all sorts of clubs, drinking clubs, anything goes. It's almost, if you can picture going back to sort of

of Weimar, Berlin, you know, Berlin in the 1920s. Cabaret. Cabaret, exactly. And all the accounts I read by the soldiers who just indulge this lifestyle, it's absolutely wonderful for them. And they sort of seem not to notice that on the other side of the street are starving Berliners, you know. So there are two completely different lifestyles going on in the city at this time. Let's talk about the Russian sector because, I mean, the first man in is Smirnoff. He's not there for very long. And then it's this guy, Alexander Kortikov. Tell us who he is and what he's like. Yes. So as I said, each sector has its own commandant. And the Soviet sector, the most important personality throughout this period is General Alexander Kottikov. Kottikov is a placement.

He's been dropped in by Stalin. I mean, if you see a photo of him, he looks absolutely extraordinary. He's got these piercing blue eyes, this sweat-back silver hair, and he's absolutely ruthless. And it's so wonderful because what happens is the four commandants they meet on a weekly basis in the city government, which is the commandatura. And this is where they discuss citywide issues. And, of course, this place turns into a slanging match, these meetings that they have. The Commandatora building, incidentally, is still there in Berlin.

When I went to Berlin to research my book, I found the building. The door was unlocked, so I wandered in. And someone said, why are you here? And I said to see the commandator. And they said, it's on the first floor. They led me upstairs. And there was this room, open the door, chandeliers, big table, chairs around the table. It's preserved exactly as it was in 1945.

And this is where the Cold War begins. In this room, the four Commandants slagging off each other, particularly Howley and Kotikov. And so there are some things, they agree on the principles. So they agree that the population of Berlin needs to be on rationed food because food is so limited. But who gets the biggest rations? They can't agree on this.

So General Kotikov says, well, it's the influencers, it's the journalists, it's the political classes. They should obviously get the biggest rations. And Frank Howley can't believe what he's hearing. He said, no, of course not. It should be the starving, the hungry, the sick, the weak, the elderly. And then he says, in despair, he turns to General Kotikov and says, you can't kick a lady when she's down. And Kotikov smiles indulgently and says, my dear General Howley, that is exactly when you should kick her. Oh, bloody hell. It's just awful.

So you can see right from the beginning, on every single thing they're going to discuss in that room, they clash and they don't agree. And this is going to be a major problem for the governance of Berlin. And what is extraordinary is that there are detailed records of these Fisticuffs. these verbal fisticuffs, because of course, you know, the commentator, it's, you know, there's somebody, there's a stenographer taking notes of all of this. So, I mean, you sort of live it in real time when you read the record. That's extraordinary. As you say, there were a whole team of female stenographers sitting in the corner of the room, dutifully taking down all this, everything, they take down everything. So even when Howley says, I'm starving, I really want my lunch now,

you know, they note all this down. And so it was extraordinary to be sitting in that room with transcripts of the conversations taking place. I just felt I entered a time cap It's one of those beautiful moments when you write history like we all do to feel you're almost there, you're back there in time. There's one principle that comes up with a commandatory. And also, this is just so interesting because it was a thing at Yalta, where Stalin makes a big thing of breaking Germany. So the Nazis will never rise again. You know, a denazification. It's a term that we hear even now from Putin in regards to Ukraine. But they have a very weird view when they actually get to Berlin of what denatification is because they do a pick and mix. of the Nazis that they want to keep and use. Can you tell us a bit about that? And it wasn't just the Soviets who did this either. No, I mean, denansification had been agreed on at Yelta. This was a great idea that anyone who was sort of tainted by the Nazi regime was to be rounded up and prison or put on trial or what have you. But yes, pick and mix. So the Soviets come in and

they actually think, well, quite a lot of these senior Nazis are pretty useful. They've got quite good transferable skills, if you like. So we'll have them. And then this begins the program, which is used by both the West and by the East, is to start rounding up useful scientists, particularly. People are good on technology, rocket scientists, atomic scientists. So the Soviets start doing this as soon as they enter the city. But of course, the Americans and Brits are doing exactly the same. And, you know, people will have heard perhaps of Operation Paperclip, which was this monumental American effort to round up nuclear physicists, atomic scientists, rocket scientists, and just simply take them back to America.

Now, one of the most famous is Verna von Braun, who rocket scientists, brilliant rocket scientists, with a rather unfortunate Nazi past and used slave labor on his rocket programs in Nazi Germany. What did the Americans do? They said, well, look, we'll wipe that slate clean. We'll give you a new invented biography, come and work for us, which he did, very much. very willingly, and of course, designed the rocket that got the Americans to the moon. So these people were very useful indeed. Literally.

Literally. Literally. Yeah, literally. Without him, they wouldn't have had it. But it isn't just scientists. And it isn't, you know, where they say, okay, look, we'll wave this wand. You're not a Nazi anymore. This is not the, it's like a Jedi trick.

This is not the Nazi you've been looking for because now he's ours. But they do it with musicians as well. There's an extraordinary story of a conductor that is, you know, a really vile, awful man. who is swept up by the Soviets as well. I mean, to tell us about that, just for the sheer scale of looting of human beings as well, if you like, and then sort of wiping them clean and then putting them back in the places that they have wreaked utter havoc. It's a fascinating story that. That's the story of the conductor Fert van Gler, who actually the jury's out really on whether he was a Nazi or not,

because he had saved individual Jewish musicians. How interesting. I thought he was a badden. Okay. Well, but he'd also played at Hitler's birthday party. He'd played at various Nuremberg rallies, conducted the orchestra. So for the Western Allies, he was tainted. He needed to be denazified. But the Soviets, you know, classical music is so important to German culture that they thought we can score a propaganda coup here, foot like Bangla, who was living in Vienna at the time.

Let's bring him to Berlin. Let's get him to do a big classical concert in the Soviet sector. let's show him, you know, try and put these rapes and looting under the carpet. Let's bring him there and show that we're as cultured as the Germans. We care about culture. And this is exactly what they did. The Western allies were furious by this. They said, it's outrageous. He's tainted by Nazism.

He needs to be denazified. The Soviets just laugh in their faces. And they'd get the last laugh because, of course, Berlin is delighted to see this great classical conductor back in their city. Charles, let's move on now to the Potsdam Conference. the first time that the big three meet again since Yalta, but it's a very different atmosphere. Tell us how it goes. Yeah, so the big three allies have met in Tehran. They've met in Yalta in February 1945.

And now they're going to meet again in the summer of 1945. So all of the Western forces and the Soviet forces are now in the city. And the big three are going to meet, except it's not quite the same big three. Roosevelt, as we've already said, has died. been replaced by his vice president, Harry Truman, a man with virtually no experience of foreign affairs whatsoever. So he flies into Berlin. Has Truman been out of the country at all, even? He's been out of the country once in his lifetime. He's really, the Brits are very, they're seriously worried about a man of such inexperience, you know, taking control, planning the

architecture of the post-war world, you know, when he's hardly traveled anywhere. He's not traveled anywhere. Also, he has, there's been no handover. Roosevelt's been so secretive, about his illness and how sick he is and getting Hoover in to cover it up. And, you know, everybody's involved in this great cover-up of how sick Roosevelt really is, that there's been no briefing given to Truman either of what Roosevelt is thinking, the conversations that he's had. I mean, he comes in inexperienced, but also blinded by his own president. Exactly.

He comes in, he swans into Berlin. As everyone said, he looks like the chairman of an international company. He was wearing a double-breasted suit, a polka dot bow tie. Yeah, he looks as if he's a. come for a board meeting. And then we have, so then Winston Churchill comes in. Now, Churchill faces a big problem. Only the British would hold a general election in the very heart of one of the most

important conferences of the post-war world. And what happens in that election, Winston Churchill famously loses it. And so Labor sweeps to power with a great election victory summer of 1945. And so halfway through the conference, Churchill goes home, doesn't come back. And Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, his foreign. and secretary come into town. And this is going to somewhat undermine the British position at the conference. But also, bizarrely, I mean, it's a Labour government. Clemattley is a Labour Prime Minister. But Ernest Bevan, despite being a Labour giant in Labour Party history, he is not a communist. He doesn't

like the Soviets. He's worried by the Soviets. And he will end up standing up to the Soviets in a way that sometimes could get a little teeny-weeny bit physical. I mean, there is a story. I talked to you about before we came on, which I love so much, but it is such an anti-Yalta thing that happens. Just tell us what happens just after the Potsdam conference. I just think we've got to paint a picture. Ernest Bevin, unlike his predecessor, Anthony Eden, this suave, sophisticated, Oxford-educated, you know, gentlemen. Then you get this bruiser, this big bruiser comes in, Ernest Bevin from a very humble background. You know, it was a lorry driver in his early...

He's like Prescott. He's sort of protein press scott. He's a protein. Yeah, we've a similar touch of violence about him, actually, because what happens is that his first words at the Pottam Conference are, I'm not going to have Britain barged about, he says, to Stalin. And he's pretty physical when he comes to negotiate. What does Stalin think of him? How does Stalin? Well, the thing that Anita's talking about is where he gets into a furious argument with Molotov, which is, of course, Stalin's foreign affairs, Supremo. And Bevin is so frustrated and so annoyed that he actually goes to throw a punch at Molotov. He has to be held back restrained by his own side. Literally, he's going to punch him in the face. Stone arse is going to get it

in the nose. Which I think is taking gunboat diplomacy to the ultimate extreme, I think. And this is actually Molotov. We've met a lot of Molotov in Yelta. This is almost Molotov's last stand, isn't it? Because shortly after this, Stalin moves against Molotov. And suddenly a note is issued to other party members that Molotov is not patriotic and, and there's an anti-smathe's, thing, has a Jewish wife, which Stalin doesn't like. And he sends her off to the gulag. He does, he does, indeed. I mean, as was so often when you're working for Stalin, you never knew what the next day was going to bring. But I think we should just, we've got, now got Truman at the conference, we've got Churchill, has swept into town and then been

swept out. What about Stalin? Well, Stalin sweeps in as the ultimate victorious general, the generalissimo, as he calls himself. Unbelievably, he gets the Tsarist imperial train out of its museum and sweeps into Berlin in this train. Just sort of, I think, really to show, you know, I'm the ultimate master here. And they're going to meet at the Sicilianhof Palace, which is in Potsdam, which is just in the sort of leafy fringes of southwest Berlin. And they're going to meet there and, well, all sorts of arguments over the future of Europe and Germany are going to rage in this conference. So we've got all these different characters and there's one important piece of news, what should have been news to the Soviets, but actually wasn't, which is that the atomic bomb

is nearly ready to go. And Truman actually tells Stalin about this during the Potsdam Conference. Yes. What happens is all throughout the entire first few days of the conference, Truman has been waiting for a secret coded message to arrive from America. And it arrives on sort of day three, day four of the conference. He gets a message and it says the patient has been operated on successfully. And this means that the first atomic test of the Manhattan Project and the America's atomic program has been successful. The bomb has gone off. It's done what it was meant to do. That is a massively explosive force. So the question is, does Truman tell Stalin about this or not? He talks with Churchill about it. And they agree they should probably, they're not going to say it's an atomic bomb. They're just going to say they've got a bomb a weapon of unspeakable power.

And so Truman sidles up to Stalin at one of the dinners, watched eagerly by Winston Churchill. And he says, you know, Joseph, we've developed an extraordinarily powerful weapon. And Stalin just doesn't bat an eyelid. He just says good, use it on the Japanese. And Truman's a little bit surprised. Churchill's a little bit surprised because what they don't know is that Soviet spies have infiltrated every aspect of the Manhattan project. And Stalin knows every detail of this already. But also, in retrospect, I mean, it's a true horror what happens to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But arguably, if only they knew they were that close to developing a bomb, they wouldn't have had to make all the concessions that Roosevelt made to the Soviets at Yalta. He wouldn't have needed to say, come, you know, let's betray Chiang Khashchek together. You can have all of this stuff in China. You can do whatever you want. You don't want us to take a position on Poland? We won't take a position on Poland, as long as you help us in the war. I think one important thing that's hanging over Roosevelt constantly at Yalta is the sheer number of American lives that are being lost in the Far East.

And one of his principal goals is to get Stalin to sign up to join the war in the Far East, which Stalin eventually does far too late, you know, right at the end of the war. So he can say he's been a part of it. But this is a real concern. For Roosevelt, in fact, dating right back to the beginning of the war, he was very concerned about bringing America into the war. he'd seen the devastation, the loss of life in the First World War, and he didn't want that repeated. So I think it's important to say that that is hanging over his every thought. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I mean, it's, you know, 20-20 hindsight is meaningless. It doesn't mean anything at all. But look, the kind of falling outs and, you know, the shouting and the screaming

that goes on and the commentator, just imagine it on the ground. So on the ground where you've got Soviet soldiers and British and American GIs, they're brawling. I mean, it sort of starts with, you know, they're drinking together, they're knocking back vodkas, we can drink harder than you can drink, and then it turns into fist of cuffs, and then shots get fired. Is it inevitable then that that whole relationship is going to break down the way it does? I think what's happening on the ground, on the streets, in the bars and the clubs, where literally soldiers are pulling out their guns and shooting each other, I think that mirrors a much larger sense that this is all going to fall apart, that this isn't going to work,

and actually that ultimately Stalin wants to take control of Berlin and of Germany, if he can, And Stalin's even eyeing up further west. Look at the resurgent Communist Party in France, in Italy, in other countries of Europe. And on top of that, the Americans are saying they're trying to demobilize their troops as quickly as possible. Get them out of Europe. They want them to send them home. There's a real feeling, certainly in Britain, that, my God, we're in real trouble here, that if the Americans leave, we have Communist Party springing up everywhere and Stalin chumping at the bit, waiting to get his hand on the rest of Berlin and the rest of Germany. Well, it will undermine everything that has been agreed at the Yalta Conference. Okay, so is that the reason that there is this decision made that we're going to club together, we Western countries and club together and have like a combined zone. We are a unit, sort of protean NATO, if you like, and that, you know, the Soviets are going to be on their side because they see the storm coming. Yes, it's sort of strength in numbers. I think they realise, first of all, that they need to join together and create both what will become the federal West Germany. They need to do the same in Berlin as well. They've seen the writing on

the wall, but also, and we'll touch on this, I guess, in the next episode, there is about to be an enormous policy shift. From the end of the war until this point we're at now, the idea has been to basically keep Germany down, crush the economy, make sure something like the Nazi regime can never, ever reappear again. There's going to be a turning point in 1946, where suddenly the Americans and the British say, hold on a minute, maybe we should gather together our forces and we should rebuild the German economy and Germany is going to become the bulwark against this monster in the east. We saw how at Yalta there was a lot of friction, both openly and covertly between Roosevelt and Churchill. Are their successes, Truman and

Atley, getting on better? They, I mean, they're very different people. Atlee is obviously a very different character to Truman, but do they recognize their common interest in a way that Roosevelt and Churchill perhaps didn't. It's funny, you know, in Truman's memoirs and letters, he writes so little about Atley. He writes all about Churchill, who was there for the first half of the conference. He keeps saying, oh, if only you wouldn't keep smarming up to me, you know. I mean, he's an all right guy, but, you know, it's rather one.

About Atley being smirming. Oh, Churchill being smirming. This is about Churchill being smirmsing. He keeps, he says to his wife, he keeps giving me soft soap, is his way of putting it, smarming up to him. I think by the time Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevan arrived, the new Labour delegation arrived, it's kind of too late. All the major issues have been sorted out already. They're there for the sort of valedictory few days of the conference. Let's take this now to the precipice of the shit hits

the fan era, which we're going to cover in the next episode. So, I mean, as you say, there's a change in thinking in 1946 where certainly the Allies say we need to have a Germany that works. We need people who can feed themselves. We need a powerhouse in Europe that is also not going to be Soviet. And Stalin's reaction to that, is it instantaneous or does it develop over time, which is, you know what, going to crush you out of Berlin and out of Germany altogether if I have to? How does that come about? Well, I think that's at the back of Stalin's mind the whole time. He's thinking that and he's thinking how to achieve it. And they try, you know, first of all, they try it through elections. They have elections in Berlin. That does not play very well for the communists at all. And so he's beginning to think,

you know, how do I achieve this? And as time goes on and we come towards the blockade, the city is gradually dividing. People will have seen those signs, you are now leaving the American sector, you're now leaving the British sector. What was quite a fluid boundaries between the sectors become hard boundaries. So gradually the city is dividing into two. We get to a situation when there's going to be two completely separate police forces. And this will then become two completely separate assemblies east and west of the city. So over the course of three years, as relations break down between the Western partners on one side and their Soviet erstwhile allies on the other side, as these relations break down, so the city and indeed Germany is

really splitting into two separate parts. But the danger, of course, for the Western sectors of Germany. Remember, look at a map. Look where Berlin is. Berlin is an island surrounded by a sea of red. And really, it doesn't take a genius to realize that if the Soviets were to cut the autobahn route into Western sectors of Berlin, if they're to cut the rail links into the Western sectors, Berlin, West Berlin is stuffed. It's got a major problem because they can't get any supplies, any food into the city for the two and a half million people who live in West Berlin. And that is exactly what happens on the 24th of June, 1948. Stalin finally decides he's going to do it.

And he cuts off all land access to West Berlin for the Western Allies. This drastic action becomes known as the Berlin blockade. And it is the subject of our very next podcast with Giles. If you are a club member, you get to hear it right away. You don't have to wait. If not, just come join our club. Empirepoduk.com. Empirepoduk.com is where you can sign up.

Very good value. Very good value. I think last time we were giving away one of William's kidneys, along with membership. Every week offers something more. We were. This time we'll be giving very big discounts. One of my kidneys. Charles' Your kidneys plus a copy of Charles' brilliant book, Checkmate in Berlin,

the First Battle of the Cold War. Yes. Discounts on that, which is worth it. Let me tell you. So until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me. William Durimple