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explaining to him what the distillery was. “Have a drink,” she said encouragingly. Soon afterwards, another truckload of Russians arriving, firing their weapons exuberantly in the air. They all packed into the distillery office, exchanging toasts. The courtyard became crowded with Italian prisoners and Russian slave labourers who had heard of the arrival of Soviet troops. Soon the Russians were very drunk. The Germans remained uneasily sober. A Russian crashed his truck into a wall after indulging in their hospitality, whence the vehicle had to be rescued by a T-34. Finally, a young lieutenant arrived in a jeep to take formal possession of the distillery. The Berganders’ alcoholic diplomacy had achieved its objective. While there were many Soviet atrocities elsewhere in Dresden, there were none in their corner of the city. For a brief time at least, a strange harmony reigned, uncharacteristic of eastern Germany under the Red Army.

If conditions in western Germany and Austria were nothing like as unhappy as those in the east, the chaos seemed desperate enough to those in its midst. Millions of people were clogging every road: Allied soldiers doing their business; liberated prisoners seeking refuge or vengeance; German soldiers struggling to get to their homes; refugees fleeing the Russians. Daily scenes of horror were enacted in the American and British zones, even if these lacked the formal sanction granted to mayhem by the Red Army. The rampage of east European ex-prisoners dismayed many Allied soldiers. “I don’t think there is a girl left over 14 who hasn’t been raped on some of the farms round here,” a British officer, a Jew born in Germany, wrote to his wife. “One surely has not too much sympathy with the German people; but this sort of punishment—well, as Colonel Bird expressed it, is so untidy.” Ron Graydon and some of his fellow PoWs liberated by the Red Army from a camp at Mühlberg were bewildered to find German women beseeching them to accept their sexual services, simply to save themselves from their Russian occupiers.

The Germans, wrote Alan Moorehead,

expected to be ill-treated. They had an immense sense, not of guilt, but of defeat. If a man’s shop was entered and looted by allied soldiers, he never dreamed of protesting. He expected it. And the reason for this was that he was afraid. Mortally and utterly afraid. One saw few tears. For the Germans the catastrophe had gone far beyond that point. Tears were a useless protest in front of the enormity of the shelling and the bombing. And so one was always surrounded by those set wooden faces. Sometimes our car got stuck in the mud. At a word, the Germans ran to push it out. Once a German came up to my driver and said: “The Russian prisoners of war are looting my shop. Will the English soldiers please come and see they do it in an orderly manner?”

An ashen-faced German officer at one PoW camp told the British that he and his men were getting out ahead of the Russians. He advised the prisoners to join them. The British refused, saying that the Russians were their allies. The German said: “You do not understand how brutal the Russians can be.” But only the small Polish contingent, fearing the Russians above all else, departed with the guards. Next morning, a group of wild horsemen on shaggy ponies appeared, followed by an equally disorderly mob of infantrymen. The French PoWs attacked the carefully hoarded clamps of potatoes. The British felt too stupefied by the speed of what was happening to do anything at all. Russian prisoners in the next compound broke out, slaughtered the cattle at a neighbouring farmhouse and began an orgy of looting and gorging their starved bodies. The British prisoners sent out a few patrols, and were so disturbed by the tales of chaos in the countryside that they decided it would be safer to stay where they were. Under Russian escort, almost as much captives as they had been a few days earlier, they were marched thirteen miles to a nearby town, where they were held for long, dreary, hungry weeks before being grudgingly repatriated.