: The Berlin Diaries
Barbara Durlacher introduces us to the diaries of Marie 'Missie' Vassilitchikov, a lady who lived in Berlin during the harsh war years.
I’ve been re-reading the “The Berlin Diaries of 1940 -1945” the diaries of Princess Marie “Missie” Vassilitschikov. As a member of an aristocratic Russian family, Marie Vassilitchikov was born in St Petersburg in 1917, the fourth child of Princess and Princess Illarion Vassilitchikov. The family left Russia in 1919 and Missie grew up in Germany, France and Lithunania where her father’s family had owned property since before the Revolution. In 1940 she started keeping a diary in which she described her work with the German Broadcasting Service and, later, with the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, where she worked with the detestable Doctor Six. The diaries provide an extraordinarily vivid insight into what life was like in Berlin during five years of war and intensive bombing.
To begin with, Missie's life appears to have been that of a high-spirited, cosmopolitan member of European high society; but before long the increasingly brutal and repressive nature of Nazi rule began to overshadow every aspect. She provides incomparable accounts of Allied bombing raids over Berlin and of life among the ruins; dust everywhere, no food or heat, the ordinary citizen’s attempts to continue normally despite the disruption. For a young girl brought up in refined and cultured circles, she mentions how desperately they longed for hot baths, the lack of which one tends to overlook when attempting to understand life in wartime, but Missie’s diaries give a memorable picture of their gritty fight for survival. As a friend of Adam von Trott, she knew about the events leading up to the July 1944 plot on Hitler's life, and was a witness to its appalling aftermath and the whiplash of Hitler’s fury. She subsequently married Peter Harnden and moved to London after the war, where she died from leukemia in 1978.
As a corollary, in 2006 two women who were both intimately involved with these historic and momentous events have died. The first was Nina Countess Schenk von Stauffenberg, whose death aged 92 was reported in April. The widow of the German officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb in July 1944 she, along with her husband's co-conspirators, bore the brunt of the Führer's thirst for revenge in the weeks after the attack. Married to Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg at 16 she had four sons and a daughter, the last child being born in posthumously in a Nazi maternity home in Berlin.
When her husband was summarily shot after his attempt to kill Hitler had failed, Himmler, as security supremo, directed that all of Stauffenberg's relatives, from his infant children to distant cousins, should be arrested and their property confiscated. Claus’ elder brother, Berthold Stauffenberg was hanged a few weeks later, while Nina Stauffenberg, who was heavily pregnant, was interrogated and imprisoned in Berlin. The four Stauffenberg children, of whom the eldest was aged 10, were placed in a state orphanage in Thuringia and given a new surname, Meister. In January 1945 Nina Stauffenberg gave birth in a Nazi maternity home to her husband's posthumous daughter, Konstanze.
Like some of those involved in the plot, Nina Stauffenberg was of the view that the heroic failure of the plan resonated more down the years than a successful coup might have done. "On the whole," she once said, "what happened was probably best for the cause." She is survived by her five children; her eldest son, Berthold, is a former general in the German army.
The second personality intimately connected to these great events was Princess Tatiana von Metternich, eldest sister of Marie Vassilitchikov, and her life spanned the last days of tsarist Russia to World War II and reconstruction after the war in Germany and who died in July 2006.
When revolution came, like many aristocratic children, Metternich, her brothers and sisters were dispatched to the Crimea for safety. In April 1919 they were evacuated by a British warship sent by King George V to rescue his aunt, the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, from whom the Vassilitchikovs were borrowing a house, and after many years of packing and unpacking, she and Marie [Missie] found lodgings and employment in Berlin to experience the years of terror so vividly described in the diaries.
A remarkable trio of women who experienced some of the worst and some of the best of European history of the last century.
[Acknowledgement is made to the obituary columns of the London Sunday Telegraph and The Times for certain facts used in this review].
