In Europe

were vaguely reminiscent of those between the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. The Lend-Lease Act was Britain's salvation, but at the same time it rendered the country, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, ‘a poor relation, not an equal partner’. There was nothing like the consolidation of resources. On the contrary, the British were mercilessly robbed of their last dollars and gold reserves. Churchill's vision was based on an America that was unanimously pro-British. In fact, the Americans helped him in order to beat Hitler, and not to preserve Britain's world empire. Great Britain, Taylor wrote, ‘sacrificed her post-war future for the sake of the war’.



Chapter THIRTY
Berlin
    WHEN THE WAR BROKE OUT, HIS MOTHER SIGHED IN RELIEF: ‘Fortunately, our Wolf is too young for that!’ He was thirteen and had just entered gymnasium. But his father growled: ‘Oh, he'll have his fill of it yet.’
    I am sitting in the garden of the retired publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler (b.1926), in Berlin's old, exclusive residential district of Dahlem. Siedler still lives in the house in which he grew up, and that is plain to see: the countless prints and paintings, the books, the warm seclusion of the rooms, the restrained luxury, the quiet garden. Dahlem was once the neighbour-hood of Walter Rathenau, of the Jewish businessmen and industrialists, and of the Nazi elite, some of whom moved into abandoned Jewish mansions. Himmler, Dönitz, Ribbentrop, half the Nazi government lived here during the war, on a street where birds sang and no bomb would ever fall.
    Siedler talks about how excited everyone was in May 1940. ‘Lots of the boys at school thought it would be just like the First World War. Trenches, long waits, and a battle every now and again. An old friend of the family told my father: ‘This Hitler, he has everyone mesmerised. The generals stare at him like rabbits at a snake.’ I can still hear those words, they stopped all conversation, until dinner was served. Later that same month, reports began coming in of one victory after another. Everyone cheered. Verdun was taken, Sedan, war veterans hugged each other in the streets.’
    Most people in Berlin lived through summer 1940 in a state of ecstasy. There was singing and dancing in the streets with every victory in France. When the great triumphal parade came goose-stepping by on 18 July,the cheering crowd stood twenty deep along the streets, people climbed into trees and on lamp posts, women ran out and hugged the soldiers, flowers and confetti rained down. ‘We, the boys of Berlin, thought the English were fantastic as well. The Battle of Britain was, in our eyes, a jousting match. People talked about the ‘campaign against France’ and the ‘campaign against Holland’. War, no, that wasn't a word we used.’
    The first booty began pouring in: furs from Norway, art, tobacco and Bols gin from Holland, wines and perfumes from France, glass from Bohemia, vodka from Poland. In the occupied areas,
Sonderkommando
s began combing the libraries and museums in search of the best European art for the big Berlin museums, and for Hitler's planned Führer Museum and Göring's Karin-Halle.
    ‘An English bomb would fall now and then,’ Siedler says, ‘but that was mostly exciting to us. We would even cycle over to a house that had been hit, we wanted to see it with our own eyes. And at school we collected shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns. We traded it back and forth.’
    Around Christmas 1940, the city encountered its first shortage of coffee and chocolate. Women were no longer allowed to buy cigarettes. More and more families began raising rabbits, ‘balcony pigs’, for their own consumption. But the striptease shows went on unabated, the restaurants served oysters, lobster and the best wines, and the citizens of Berlin lived well. The weekly ration consisted of a pound of meat, a quarter-pound of butter and three pounds of bread.
    In the new year, talk began of another ‘campaign’, this time against Russia. It was to be a matter of out and back again in a few months. Loudspeakers were set up all over the city to broadcast marches. Music, then a crackly voice: ‘From the Führer's headquarters’, followed by an announcement of the fall of Riga, or Minsk, or Kiev, or Odessa.
    It was only in autumn 1941, when the soldiers still had not returned and winter was fast approaching, that the city grew uneasy. The loudspeakers stopped reporting victories.