SURVIVING BERLIN: AN ORAL HISTORY

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

The World I Was Born Into

War

On the Road

At War’s End

East Meets West

When Father Returned

Peacetime

An Unexpected Development

Go West

Climate Change

Separate, Not Equal

Dispatches from the Hitler Years

Where the Girls Are

Lido Shuffle

Back and Forth

The Summer of ’62

Fast Forward: The Circle is Complete

Epilogue

About the Author

Copyright © 2017 by Karl M. von der Heyden

MCP Books

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Brandenburg Gate, May 1945 (Cover): Image ID: DKYTEA, dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo; Map of Europe 1922: Department of Military Art and Engineering, US Military Academy; WWII one-man roadside air raid shelter: Das Archiv für technische Dokumente 1900-1945, Wikimedia Commons; Bombed-out Berlin: Image ID: E14N8H, Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo; Map of Berlin Airlift Corridors: Free Software Foundation, Wikimedia Commons; British Sunderland seaplane: Image ID: CNRHPT, CPC Collection/Alamy Stock Photo; Gail Halvorsen: US Air Force, Wikimedia Commons; MS Italia, 1957: postcard courtesy of author; Lido Beach Hotel: postcard courtesy of author.

ISBN-13: 9781545605417

Distributed by Itasca Books

Printed in the United States of America

Foreword

Norman Pearlstine

Every profession has its Babe Ruth or its Duke Ellington—a legend whose career defies comparison. Every successful enterprise has its secret weapon—that trusted individual who gets results while shunning the limelight.

Karl von der Heyden is both.

Between 1980 and 2001 he served as the CFO of three of America’s largest consumer products companies: HJ Heinz, RJR Nabisco, and PepsiCo. In those jobs Karl was more than the numbers guy. He was also the consummate dealmaker, very much responsible for each of the companies’ mergers and acquisitions. He supervised complex corporate restructurings. And he was the straight shooter, often telling CEOs what they might not want to hear. He did so in ways that changed behavior and beliefs. No wonder he became a trusted advisor to CEOs elsewhere, who routinely sought his guidance. Many asked him to join their boards and he served as an independent director on a dozen large publicly held companies, including the New York Stock Exchange (later NYSE Euronext), DreamWorks Animation, and Macy’s.

It is hard to think of other American executives who matched Karl’s accomplishments. And none of them possessed his self-effacing nature.

Surviving Berlin is Karl’s story. It begins with his birth in Berlin in 1936, followed by his poignant recollections of growing up in Nazi Germany. Following the war Karl’s family remained in West Berlin during the Occupation, experiencing constant hunger, as did so many other Germans. He came to America in 1957 to attend Duke University before embarking on his business career.

Along the way he became an American citizen. But it is those years in Germany that best explain his subsequent success and his admirable demeanor. While at Duke, he says he searched through old newspapers trying to figure out how mass murder on the grandest scale by a great civilized society could have been perpetrated. And even today Karl says he is part of a generation of Germans plagued by guilt about what the Nazis did to Jews and other minorities.

Those early years also help explain Karl’s lifelong commitment to philanthropy. He and his wife, Mary Ellen von der Heyden, have funded numerous fellowships and an addition to the library at Duke; they also helped build a new arts center there.

I came to know Karl in recent years when he served as chairman of the American Academy in Berlin while I was its president. Applying his financial skills to the Academy, he more than tripled its endowment, and he and Mary Ellen also endowed a fellowship for fiction.

Despite his obvious talent for business, Karl tells me he grew up wanting to be a journalist—and that he somehow got sidetracked along the way. I am so pleased that with Surviving Berlin he has begun to pursue his true calling.

Karl writes that his background taught him to be skeptical of extremists, be they political ideologues or religious fanatics and that he shudders at the expression of too much overt patriotism, flag waving, or talk of ‘exceptionalism’ of this or that country.

I can only hope he will continue to write and that he will further enlighten us as he discovers more about himself and the world he and we live in.

Preface

Many people have urged me to write down the story of my life. After all, I witnessed some of the major turning points of the twentieth century. But, truth be told, I never had a particular interest in talking about any of it, including my upbringing in Germany during World War II.

But, with the help of Marc Rosenwasser, an award-winning journalist and television producer, I began to recall my life in bits and pieces. Over the course of a year and a half, we sat in my study and talked at great length. Each step of the way, he prodded me to remember, to mine the truth. While I supplied the vodka and dark chocolates, he supplied the questions.

Memories are, at best, capricious. Some of my recollections are second hand: what, for example, I heard as a child from my mother or other adults, from my late brother (who was seven years older than I), or from the newspapers and radio broadcasts. To make sure I got it right, I am indebted to my wife, Mary Ellen, and my older sister, Gisela, both of whom offer their own accounts herein, sometimes filling in the gaps, sometimes serving as gentle corrections. Their recollections are italicized wherever they appear. As you’ll read briefly later, my wife also got involved in a very personal way during the Cold War.

The events described in this book cover a period of a little more than a quarter century—from the summer of 1936 until the summer of 1963: the first third of my life. During that time, Hitler, who ruled over Nazi Germany from an office maybe ten miles from my home, carried out the mass extermination of six million Jews. When the Allies finally defeated Nazism, World War II gave way to the Cold War and the rise of Communism. My hometown, Berlin, was—for forty-five years—the potential flashpoint between East and West. During this same period, race relations here in America went through a major upheaval, with segregation finally giving way to the beginnings of integration. Through happenstance, as much as anything else, I witnessed it all close up—first in Berlin, then in the southern United States.

I was born in the summer of 1936 in Berlin—the heart of Nazi Germany. From the time I was three until I was nearly nine, my life was shaped by the war raging above and around me. Although I was only a young child, I was keenly aware of my surroundings. As with so many children who have lived through violent conflict, I grew up fast. Though my parents did all they could to keep me out of harm’s way, the war took an unmistakable toll: first, with disruptions to our daily lives; and, later, with massive destruction and deprivation, which I both witnessed and experienced. In the years following the war, my family and I, like millions of other Germans, personally experienced constant hunger.

For many years after peace came to Germany, the consequences of that horrific war continued to define my everyday existence. I spent a great deal of time during my years at Duke University in the late 1950s and early 1960s poring over old newspapers, trying to piece together what the Nazis did, trying to understand what my own parents knew, trying to figure out how mass murder on the grandest scale by a great civilized society could have been perpetrated. Even today, seven decades later, I am part of a generation of Germans plagued by guilt about what the Nazis did to the millions of Jews and other minorities they somehow deemed inferior. I am ashamed to be associated in any way with the greatest holocaust in history.

In no way is anything in this memoir meant to compare my family’s travails with the terrible suffering experienced by so many during and after the war. There is no comparison of any kind to be made.

This memoir is only meant to fill in some blanks about what life was like in Germany during and after the war years and how one German came to learn about, visit, and ultimately embrace America, a country I am now a citizen of—a country I love.

The United States has been very good to me. Thanks to an abundance of luck, a solid education in Germany and later at Duke and Wharton, and some decent business skills, I forged a successful business career in the United States.

My journey from the bomb shelter outside my childhood home in Germany to the corporate boardrooms in America is definitely an unlikely one.

But ultimately, mine is a story of good fortune. After all, the very title of this book is Surviving Berlin.

PART I

GERMANY

One

The World

I Was Born Into

1936 was a big year for Berlin, my hometown. The Olympic Games had been awarded to the city, and Hitler pulled out all the stops to make the Games a propaganda success for the Nazi regime. He wanted to show the world a peaceful Germany and even temporarily suspended persecution of Jews and other minorities. He largely succeeded in his effort to fool an uncritical world.

That’s the world I was born into, on the eighteenth of July 1936, in a women’s clinic in the district of Wilmersdorf. I caused trouble right away. My parents had tickets for the Olympics, but because of me, my mother missed the opening ceremony.

The house I grew up in is on the outskirts of Berlin but still within the city limits. The place is called Weinmeisterhöhe in the district of Spandau, about ten miles due west from the heart of the city. Spandau is where Berlin’s two rivers, the Spree and the Havel, intersect. We were west of the Havel, where relatively few people lived, and (unlike most of Berlin, which is flat) the area was elevated. My father built the house on about a half hectare (or one acre) of land with a great view of the Havel River that formed into a lake directly below; the river was almost a kilometer, or about six-tenths of a mile, across.

I should say that my life, at least at the beginning, was a privileged one. Our house had several bedrooms, and even a separate wing for my paternal grandmother. We also had a live-in nanny and a cook.

Fräulein Grete, the nanny, I remember, was fairly young. We also had a tailor, an older woman, who would come and stay for several weeks each year. She did all of the sewing for the family, making new clothes. It was fairly unusual, but, in those days, my father’s job earned him a good income, and so we were able to have such extras.

My father was an aircraft design engineer who worked for the Junkers Aircraft Company. He had joined Junkers in the 1920s, and later became one of the head engineers after Junkers merged with Lufthansa, the German airline.

My father’s life history is as twisted as the times in which he lived. He was born Werner Müller in 1894 in Duisburg, a town in Westphalia, but the family later moved to Kauffung in Silesia, which is now Polish. His father, my grandfather, was an industrialist involved in steel (or coal) production. He committed suicide during the 1920s. I heard two stories about the reason why: one said that he was desperate when his business failed during a financial crisis; the other that he did it when his affair with a household maid was discovered. I don’t know which is true.

My father became a cadet at the German Naval Academy before World War I. During his naval training, he sailed to Central America, Cuba, and Florida. When World War I broke out in 1914, he was assigned to a cruiser and participated in several naval battles, including the biggest naval battle in World War I, the battle of Jutland, which took place in the Skagerrak Sound between Norway and Denmark. He wouldn’t talk much about his war experiences in either world war, but I remember him talking about Jutland. He said that they could hardly see the opposing British vessels when they bombarded each other. Sometimes you could only see the smoke from the chimneys above the horizon. It made the battle and the killings rather impersonal. My father finished the war as a lieutenant.

When World War I was over, under the Versailles Treaty ending the war, Germany could have no air force, no army, no navy; the country was limited to something equivalent to a national guard.

But those who had been in the former military thought, Why did we lose this war? We were doing pretty well. In retrospect, we now know that the Nazis realized and exploited the fact that many ordinary Germans hadn’t really believed that they had been defeated; they thought that there was some conspiracy of the Communists and the Jews against the German people. That was most likely at least partly due to the fact that World War I was mostly fought outside of Germany’s borders.

The German people had been living under a monarchy with totalitarian tendencies; they heard nothing but positive propaganda. Then, all of a sudden, they read in the newspapers that the war was over and their country had lost. It was a non sequitur, leading to a nationwide case of cognitive dissonance.

When my father came back with thousands of other officers after World War I, he and the rest of them didn’t know what to do. For the first time in his life, he became politically engaged. There were a lot of so-called free corps, or former troops, banding together on their own. In Silesia, where my father had grown up, the Poles had taken over; so the former German troops started a private war in Silesia and drove the Poles out of the region. My father took part in that but, subsequent to that, he studied metallurgy at a university and received an engineering degree.

One of the other provisions of the Treaty of Versailles was to restrict Germany’s ability to manufacture airplanes and fly them to other countries. To circumvent this, Junkers would build planes and then fly them to Sweden, which was a neutral country, where all the planes would get Swedish insignia. Afterward, they would fly them back to Germany and use them for civilian air travel within Germany—and to other countries.

It was during this same period, the mid-20s, when my father met my mother, who was also working at Junkers Aircraft. Her position was more or less that of a secretary because women were not encouraged to get advanced degrees—or high-level jobs—in those days.

My mother sometimes accompanied my father on his trips to Sweden. She told me that they once made an emergency landing in a field. Engine failure was not that rare at the time, and it was also not a big deal. The planes simply landed at the next suitable cornfield or other location. So for my parents the trip was like a boondoggle—fly to Sweden, get a nice meal, get the plane repainted, and fly back. The planes, of course, were commercial and passenger planes, not military. (Germany didn’t start to redevelop its military until Hitler came to power in 1933.)

Both my parents were ardent skiers and they got engaged on New Year’s Eve of ’26 after they each had won prizes for second place in a ski race. They were living in Dessau at the time. (Not far from Berlin, Dessau is a town that is known mainly as the place where Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus style—with its merging of architecture, art, and design.)

My parents were married in 1928. My mother had grown up in Hagen, in Westphalia, in a large family. Her father owned a company called Heyda Werke, which made paper products such as notebooks, diaries, office