The House by the Lake Page 17

  In an effort to distract the commissioners, Will then interrupted the proceedings – this was not a usual criminal court in which only the prosecutor and defence put the questions – and asked his former lawyer about the efforts that he, Will, had made to protect Hartmann and his wife.

  Walch: I can only say that Herr Meisel didn’t have a very good reputation [with the Nazis] because of the Hartmann issue. Hartmann was Meisel’s manager, which was not allowed because he was not a member of the Reich Chamber of Culture. This led to certain problems. It was necessary to get him a work permit and to get special liberties for Frau Hartmann.

  When Walch was asked who had suggested that he obtain a special permit for Frau Hartmann, he replied that it was Will Meisel and Hanns Hartmann, adding that he was not paid for these efforts.

  Walch sat down and was followed by Wilhelm Lachner, who said that he worked in the music business and had known Will for twenty years. He told the court that he was ‘often in Groß Glienicke, where he met the creative director Hartmann’. He added that there they listened to foreign radio together. He said that as well as Frau Hartmann, Will Meisel had helped other people who were ‘impacted by the Nuremberg Laws’, including the composer Willy Rosen. When Vogel asked whether he had seen one of Will Meisel’s employees load the company car with Nazi propaganda and drive it to marches and parades, he said that he didn’t know.

  Finally came Paul Fago. He said that he had known Will for twenty-five years and had worked at his company since the mid 1930s. He said that 90 per cent of authors published by Will were Jewish, and after Jewish music was banned from the radio, the company fell into debt. ‘I think he joined the party to save his company,’ he said, adding that Will was ‘neither a Nazi nor a militarist’, and that even in March 1945 he had skilfully avoided serving in the Volkssturm, the people’s militia. Contradicting Will’s earlier testimony, however, Fago said that Edition Meisel had in fact published at least three militaristic songs.

  The chairman of the proceedings then returned to the issue of Will purchasing Jewish properties14. Herr Meisel had ‘resisted’ buying Jewish properties, Fago said, and was an ‘opponent’ of such deals. The only exception, he added, was Meisel’s attempt in 1938 to purchase the Austrian publisher, Universal Edition.

  It was at this point that Will jumped in again, asking Fago about the office tuning in to BBC Radio. Fago then confirmed that ‘Meisel was brave enough to listen with staff to foreign programmes’. He had never seen Will with any Nazi Party sign inside the office, he added, nor did the staff greet each other with Heil Hitlers, nor were Nazi Party meetings held at the company offices. Will was constantly visited by famous writers and composers, he said, and had ‘very dangerous conversations during these times for which we could have lost our heads’. When Vogel asked if this was an anti-fascist group, Fago said that it was, and that Will was part of it.

  Vogel then said that the last document he wished to read out was written by Hanns Hartmann15, and had been sent to him from Cologne, dated 31 May 1948. In his statement, Hartmann said that it had been his idea to purchase Universal Edition16, to safeguard the interests of the Jewish owner while he was unable to own it himself. He said that he didn’t remember Will trying to purchase other Jewish properties.

  Critically, despite Will Meisel’s repeated claims that he had protected the Hartmanns from the Nazis, Hanns did not mention his former boss’s help. Nor did he say that Will Meisel had assisted other Jewish composers, or indeed that the Hartmanns had been allowed to seek refuge for more than a year at the lake house.

  There are several interpretations for Hanns’s lack of attendance, as well as his silence on his former employer’s alleged support. Certainly, Hanns was himself busy with running the broadcasting organisation in Cologne, not to mention the fact that he wished to avoid contact with the Soviet security police who patrolled Berlin’s streets. According to a statement given by Paul Fago to one of the denazification investigators prior to the trial, there existed a degree of ‘hatred’ between the two men, though ‘most of the fights were about views on artistry’. In addition, Will likely exaggerated his role as saviour. Like other Jews who were married to Aryans, Ottilie would most likely have been protected from the worst excesses of the Nazi regime without the interference of the music publisher. In other words, Hanns felt no obligation to express his gratitude.

  Following a final statement from Will Meisel, the commissioners retired to deliberate. It took only a few minutes for them to reach their conclusion that the publisher was indeed no more than a nominal member of the Nazi Party and that the evidence showed he was not a believer in their ideology. Furthermore, despite the publisher having tried to purchase Jewish companies in 1938, the commission took the view that he did not do so for personal gain or anti-Semitic reasons. As a result, the commissioners announced that they believed Will should be able to work again, a decision which would be forwarded to the British Military Government, where it would almost certainly be rubber-stamped.

  Will rejoiced, realising how close he had come to disaster. It seemed that he had been cleared of any wrongdoing and would not receive any punishment.

  Yet as Vogel and his staff delivered their verdict, a larger political story was gripping the city. For, the day before the trial, 24 June 1948, the Soviet authorities had announced that with immediate effect they would erect a blockade against the population of West Berlin. The effect was that the two and a half million inhabitants who lived in the Allied-occupied sectors were cut off from the rest of the world.

  Berlin was under siege.

  16

  MEISEL

  1948

  EARLY IN THE morning of 26 June 1948, the plates and cups in the kitchen cupboard of the now vacant lake house rattled, as a Dakota C47 roared overhead, barely fifty metres above its rooftop. It was the first British plane to arrive at Gatow. The Allied-sponsored rescue mission for the people of Berlin, or what would become known as the Berlin Airlift, was underway.

  Wanting to control all of Berlin, the Soviets had made a decision to force the issue by sealing the road, train and water routes into West Berlin. The only remaining access to West Berlin had been the three air corridors that cut through Soviet airspace. Calculating that their aircraft would not be shot down – based on the assumption that the Soviets would not wish to dramatically escalate the situation – the Americans, British and French had acted quickly1. Within a few hours they had organised round-the-clock flights to support West Berlin’s citizens. Located close to the city, and as one of only three airports available to the Allies, Gatow was an obvious staging post for the airlift.

  The greatest need was coal, which was transported in large hessian sacks and made up the bulk of deliveries. Flour, rice, fish and potatoes were also flown in to Gatow, as were light bulbs, milk and mail. Before long, more than five thousand people were supporting the airlift operation at the British airfield. Once the planes had pulled up to enormous hangars, teams worked round the clock to unload the precious cargo. While the coal was transferred to boats waiting nearby on the River Havel, to be delivered on to West Berlin’s power station, other goods were trucked into the city. At peak efficiency, a plane could be unloaded and ready for take-off within fifteen minutes. As the air traffic increased, planes were coming and going from the airfield every few minutes. At first there was only one runway at Gatow. Realising the enormous volumes that would be required to feed and heat the city, the British set about building a second.

  Gatow airfield, with the northern tip of Groß Glienicke Lake visible (top left)

  At weekends, the village children would gather by the Potsdamer Tor, jumping up and down with excitement as they waited for the next plane to arrive. If they were lucky, as they followed the plane’s last few hundred metres to Gatow, parcels would rain down, each slowed by a tiny parachute. The children would scramble to grasp them, for they were gifts from the British, containing biscuits and chocolate.

  One of the children chasi
ng the planes was Lothar Fuhrmann. Then ten years old, he had moved with his family just a few months earlier into the Munks’ property next to the lake house. The Munks were leasing their weekend house having chosen, at least for now, to focus their energies in Berlin.

  Lother’s father, Erich, had served in the army during the war, and at its end he had been held for a short period, accused of war crimes. The charges were dropped and he had been released. Before arriving in Groß Glienicke the Fuhrmanns had lived in northern Germany near the Baltic Sea. They had found the house through Lothar’s uncle, who worked as Professor Munk’s gardener.

  Lothar Fuhrmann was fascinated by the airlift. Whenever he could, he raced over to the airfield along the old sandy path and past the ruins of the schloss. There, joining the other boys and girls, Lothar stood by the wire fence watching the planes as they prepared to land, their wheels almost scraping the village roofs and, with a roar and screech of engines, touching down just feet from where they were standing.

  Some of the children had notebooks in which they scribbled the number and types of planes as they came and went. There were aircrafts of all shapes and sizes. The silver Dakota C47, for instance, a stumpy workhorse of a plane, and Gatow’s most frequent visitor; or the Tudor 688, with a long thin body and an awkward wheel beneath the tail; or the enormous Handley Page Hastings, the largest transport plane the children would see, with four wing-mounted Bristol Hercules engines and a retractable undercarriage; the box-like, evergreen-coloured Lancaster, with its gun turret jutting out in front; or the Short Sunderland 10s, with their heron-like snouts and wing stabilisers, a seaplane that landed directly onto the River Havel. These last were used for transporting salt as they were designed to be impervious to corrosion.

  As the months progressed, the activity at Gatow grew even more intense. On 10 October 1948, for example, there were over 442 landings at the small airfield, and the same number of take-offs. On 16 April 1949, there were 944 landings and take-offs, many of them during the night, resulting in a plane arriving or leaving Gatow every ninety seconds.

  The American, French and British planes and their air crews were not the only ones responsible for the airlift’s success. The West Berliners themselves flush-centered enormous stoicism, withstanding great physical and mental hardship so that their city was not taken by the Soviets. Berliners helped the crews unload the planes and transported the goods around the city; they distributed food and water to the elderly and sick; and they generally boosted morale. They also developed ingenious ways of getting around the blockade.

  Late in the autumn of 1948, Will Meisel ventured out of West Berlin into the Brandenburg countryside. Though he was crossing from the city’s British sector into Soviet-occupied Germany, such border crossings were allowed, and he was waved through by the guard. First, Will drove out to the lake house to make sure everything was in order. He hadn’t visited for a while, and was glad to find it securely locked and undamaged. Then he approached some of the local farmers, hoping to trade pieces of his wife’s jewellery for eggs, meat and fresh fruit, all of which had become scarce in West Berlin. Such journeys, or ‘hamster trips’ as they were known, were common at the time, but forbidden by the Soviet authorities. While crossing back into the city, Will had to hide his newly acquired goods – they would have been confiscated, had he been caught.

  A few weeks later, Will Meisel contacted Bruno Balz, a composer known for his rousing lyrics with whom he had worked during the war, and suggested they produce a song celebrating the city’s resistance and solidarity. In a short space of time, they wrote, ‘Berlin bleibt doch Berlin’. Almost immediately the song became West Berlin’s anthem, and was widely sung and hummed in the streets of the city. This catchy tune was Will’s biggest hit since ‘Ilona’ in the 1920s.

  Berlin is still Berlin

  Nothing can change it!

  For us, it will remain Berlin

  The best city in the world.

  Despite his pride in the city and its citizens, Will’s professional life continued to frustrate him. After his success in front of the denazification panel, the German-staffed West Berlin council had written to the British Military Government’s Theatre and Music Section on 14 September 1948, requesting that approval be given for Will to work once again. They concluded with the words: ‘There should be no concerns to give Will Meisel a permit to operate his company.’

  This request was first passed to the director of the British Cultural Relations Branch (Book Section) in Berlin, and then on to their head office in Hamburg. Attached was Will Meisel’s 1938 letter to Hans Hinkel asking if he could purchase Jewish businesses2, along with a letter in which George Clare, head of the British Licensing Control Section in Berlin, had written that ‘this section would strongly object’ if either Will or Eliza Meisel was allowed to ‘hoodwink’ the British Military Government, and that he ‘strongly recommended’ that Will not be given a licence to work in the music industry. In a reference to Will’s creative director, Clare noted that ‘Hartmann was the only person in the whole outfit who was ok’. Further down the letter, Clare summed up his opinion: ‘Herr Will Meisel is as black a character as can be3. He was also a party member since 1933 and has to await his denazification. This has, however, not prevented him from living very, very well since the end of the war.’

  On 11 July 1949, more than a year after Will’s denazification trial, the director of the Hamburg office wrote a brief memo to the Information Services Division: ‘The following application has been rejected, and the file is returned for your retention.’ To be prevented from working this long from the war’s end was highly unusual. For this to happen to a composer and publisher of music, rather than a member of the SS or Gestapo, was even more noteworthy.

  Why was Will Meisel still barred from work, given that the vast majority of former Nazi Party members had not only been exonerated but were busily rebuilding their businesses? The answer is that in these other cases, the British, American and French authorities had been unable to prove their suspect’s guilt. Indeed, most of the British investigators were infuriated that so few Nazi Party members had faced justice. Their problem was that the necessary evidence had been destroyed during the war. This was why Will Meisel’s letter to Hans Hinkel was so extraordinary, and damning. It was one of the rare examples where complicity in what had been a widespread crime to purchase Jewish properties could be proven.

  For now, at least, Will would have to rely on others to run his business.

  17

  MEISEL

  1949

  BY THE SPRING of 1949, almost a year after the Soviets had cut off supplies to Berlin, it became clear that the Allies were winning the blockade. Making use of the British airport in Gatow as well as the French airport at Tegel and the American airport at Tempelhof, the Allies had run over 275,000 flights, providing more than 2.3 million tons of food, coal and medical supplies to the population of West Berlin. Having survived the brutal winter months of 1948, in which visibility was at times less than fifty metres, temperatures twenty below zero and snowstorms a regular occurrence, the crews were boasting that they could maintain the airlift for an indefinite time.

  The realisation that their siege had failed was a bitter pill for Stalin and his supporters, for they would have to continue to live with American, French and British troops stationed in the heart of Eastern Europe. So, on 12 May 1949, the Soviets reluctantly lifted their blockade. This climbdown was in the face of increasing tensions between the Soviet Union and the West.

  Eleven days after the blockade’s end, on 23 May, the Allies merged their three zones of occupation into one new country: the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), or the Federal Republic of Germany (also known as ‘West Germany’). A West German constitution, the Basic Law, was soon ratified. While inspired by the Weimar Republic, this new constitution differed in key respects to that of its predecessor. Perhaps most importantly, it enshrined the rights of the individual and declared that the government could never s
eize emergency powers. As a symbol of its independence, West Germany also adopted a new national flag, based on the black, red and gold tricolour of the democratic revolutions of 1848/9, and a new currency, the deutschmark. This independent West German state was a direct and inflammatory challenge to the Soviets, who had long fostered hopes that they would control the whole of Germany. Yet to many in Europe and around the world, the partition of Germany was the correct choice. As The Times declared, Britain, the USA and France must remain ‘steadfast and resolute’, now that the Germans had ‘shown that they would prefer to have half Germany free than all Germany under threat from a communist dictatorship’.

  The animosity between the world powers took a turn for the worse four months later, on 23 September 1949, when the leaders of the USA, Britain and Canada jointly announced that they had discovered ‘evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion has occurred in the Soviet Union’. The world’s newspapers reacted with shock. A New York Times column warned that the Soviet Union might soon have a stockpile of bombs sufficient ‘to destroy fifty of our cities with 40,000,000 of our population’, while the Sydney Morning Herald spoke of ‘Alarm in Berlin’.