Weihnachten 1945: Berlin's first Christmas in the ruins
Rubble, longing, and stubborn hope.
How many know what it means to spend Christmas under the bombs? Today, millions. In Europe. In Ukraine. How many know what the first Christmas after peace arrives feels like? Today, a few hundred thousand Christians in Syria, and as many in Lebanon. Then there are those who live in an in-between zone—no longer war but not yet peace, still destruction: Palestine and Gaza, and elsewhere in Africa and the world.
How many remember the first Christmas of peace after the Second World War in Europe? Few, and fewer each year: eighty years have passed. Yet 1945 has never been talked about as much as this year—anniversary, warning, the beginning of a world order now in fragments.
For many, it marked the beginning of a new life. Sometimes a return to their own homes or to the rubble of what was once home. Sometimes exile. Sometimes displacement, searching for a new homeland after their previous one ceased to exist.
Today we return to Berlin, told through the personal diaries and newspapers of the time, to those Christmas days of 1945. To remember what the first Christmas after the war was, and what it means in every age
Friedensweihnachten 1945
Friedensweihnachten—”Peace Christmas”: this is what contemporaries called the first Christmas after the Second World War. The first in six years without the Führer’s voice crackling through the Volksempfänger radio, without bombs falling through winter darkness.
But peace is not the same as plenty. And Berlin—what remains of Berlin—knows this in its bones. The city lies in ruins, Trümmern. Rubble mountains where neighborhoods once stood. The “1000-year Reich” lasted twelve years and left the capital unrecognizable.
In December 1945, the evangelical Provost Grüber—a man of resistance—writes his Christmas message to the community. He asks the question weighing on every mind: "Ist nun das Friedensweihnacht gekommen, das wir uns ersehnt und erträumt haben?", "Has the peace Christmas we longed for and dreamt of now arrived?"1.
Yes. And no. This is Deutschland Jahr Null. Germany Year Zero. Everything must be rebuilt from nothing. The bishops speak of guilt and forgiveness in their Christmas sermons—of “verhängnisvollen Taten“ and “schweren Verfehlungen,” “fateful deeds” and “grave transgressions.” They preach that “wirklicher Frieden auf Erden kann nur von innen her wachsen”—true peace can only grow from within, from hearts that no longer delight in violence but in love.2
Fine words for men who don’t freeze and don’t starve. Below, in the ruins, people have more immediate concerns.
Kälte. Cold.
Charlotte Heinze is sixteen years old. When asked many years later to remember Christmas 1945, she had only one word: cold. “Our only room—one large room—had a temperature between one and three degrees Celsius.” That’s 34 to 37 degrees Fahrenheit. She and her mother spend most of their time in bed, fully clothed. The windows are covered with cardboard. There is no strength for big thoughts.
The winter of 1945–46 is mild by German standards. But that offers no mercy. When you have nothing to burn, a mild winter means slow cold instead of fast cold. Tables become fuel. Chairs become warmth. Survival becomes arithmetic.
Anne-Marie Durand-Wever, a gynaecologist, writes on December 27: “Weihnachten ist vorüber, ich habe versucht, ohne Sentimentalität darüber hinwegzukommen.” Christmas is over; she tried to get through it without sentimentality. The curfew has been lifted—the Allies’ Christmas gift—but now there are attacks in the evening hours. She’s afraid of falling in the dark streets. Still recovering. Still limping. “Aber es muss gehen.” But it must work. There’s no other choice.3
Berlin’s food supply council—the Ernährungsbeirat—makes every effort. But what can they do when nothing arrives?
The numbers tell the story: 300,000 eggs planned from Brandenburg per quarter. Delivered: 23,890. District administrators declare the quota “unerfüllbar“—unfulfillable. Yet on Berlin’s black markets, eggs appear. Magical eggs. Raids and arrests change nothing. The dealers simply gather in a different square the next day. Those dealers: pushers and speculators.
In September, the Ernährungsbeirat requested a Christmas “special allocation” (Sonderzuteilung) for Berlin’s population: flour, sugar, fat, coffee, spirits. The Allies deemed it too lavish. Request denied. By late November, they try again. Just flour for Christmas biscuits. For the children only. This time, permission is granted. The biscuit cutters are fashioned from Wehrmacht tins.
The children need more than cookies.
Orphans are found on railways and roads—months fleeing westward, their families lost somewhere on the journey. Their condition is pitiful: swollen bellies, thickened joints. Some are so weak they cannot sit up in bed. In improvised nursery homes, they receive extra rations: milk, sugar, potatoes. An attempt to coax life back into small bodies that have known only hunger.
Beyond Berlin, conditions were scarcely better.
Anneliese Frenzel is eighteen, living in Thuringia. Fifteen people share her house—two refugee families and her own. Every day, the same question: “Was sollen wir essen?” What should we eat? On Heiligabend, they pool their resources. A little fat from everyone’s ration cards. Water, flour, salt, marjoram. They cook falsche Leberwurst—fake liverwurst. Spread it on bread. “Da war keine Weihnachtsstimmung. Es war unwirklich. Irgendwie schwebte man nur so durch diese Zeit.” No Christmas mood. It was unreal. Somehow one just floated through this time.
Christel Beythan is thirteen, newly arrived from Pommern, escaped from Soviet troops. She and her mother and younger sister wear wooden clogs—their shoes were taken during the flight. Everything they own fits in small suitcases. They spent weeks in quarantine in a refugee camp before being assigned to a Wirtshaus in a Thuringian village. On Christmas Eve: boiled potatoes with skin. “For us, it wasn’t Christmas,” she recalled decades later. “We had to settle in first, wherever they’d brought us.” Her father and brother were dead. Fallen in the war. This is the first Christmas of many without them.
Sehnsucht. Longing
Three million German soldiers sit in Soviet captivity. They will not be home for Christmas 1945. Many will not be home for Christmas 1946, 1947, or 1948. Some will never come home.
In 1944, propaganda leaflets rained into the trenches: “FROHE WEIHNACHTEN! Landser – gebt Euch gefangen!” Surrender and save your lives, help end the war, then there will be a truly merry Christmas again. The leaflets showed photos from a Russian POW camp: a German soldier carving a goose, another reading by a decorated tree, Father Christmas making his rounds. Nobody believed it in 1944. Nobody believes it in 1945.
Wolfgang Stadler celebrates Christmas Eve in the Soviet POW camp in Asbest, in the Ural Mountains. He and the other men sing the old Christmas carols behind barbed wire. “Each man dreamt his Christmas dream of how it would be at home now.”
They dreamt themselves back to a time before the war, when Christmas was still a beautiful family celebration. The cultural group performs. Some men pull their jackets over their heads and weep. Each man had to come to terms with himself.
At home, the women wait. The churches still standing are full on Christmas Eve. Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, who would become a grande dame of the German Liberal Party FDP, remembered: they were living "im Stall"—in the stable—not knowing what the next day would bring. The Christmas message of angels coming to shepherds, of hope born in poverty, felt immediate, alive.
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich writes in her diary on December 25. She is a journalist and resistance fighter who operated under the codename "Uncle Emil"—a survivor of twelve years she documented night by night in writings that became essential testimony of life under and after the Reich. Her "Der Schattenmann," published in English as "Berlin Underground," captured what official history could not: the texture of daily resistance, small acts of defiance, the long wait for liberation. On this first Friedensweihnacht, she writes:
«First post-war Christmas (…) How differently we had imagined it.’ There is no tree, no gift, and Leo is no longer alive. ‘Only that since the day before yesterday the curfew has been lifted and one may, if one has the courage, still go out after eleven o’clock in the evening.»4
No tree. No gifts. Leo is dead—her partner Leo Borchard, the conductor who survived twelve years of Nazi persecution only to be shot by an American patrol three months after liberation.
Small joys, stubborn life
Film footage survives of a simple Christmas market among the rubble. Wooden stalls. A few goods for sale. People moving slowly, carefully, through the ruins.
Christmas trees were in high demand. The Tagesspiegel reports on December 24: “Christbaumdiebe wurden gestern in den nördlichen Vororten Berlins gestellt.”—Christmas tree thieves were apprehended yesterday in the northern suburbs of Berlin. You had to prove your tree was legal, but nobody could. All were stolen—from forests, from parks, from front gardens.
The solution: the Not-Tannenbaum, the “emergency Christmas tree”. Drill holes in a broomstick, insert branches. Some families discovered their ornaments had survived in the cellar—even the delicate glass baubles. Small miracles.
Hannelore Radke is eight years old. She receives a dollhouse made from an orange crate. The walls are lined with wallpaper scraps. A piece of linoleum serves as flooring. Perfume bottles become vases. The dollhouse sits on a coal box.
The adults do their best to make Christmas feel real for the children. The Allies help too: on 24 December, they lift the curfew. You can go out after 23:00. Life becomes a little more normal. “Ein Ausdruck des Vertrauens der Alliierten gegenüber der Berliner Bevölkerung”—an expression of trust. Kreuzberger Nächte are long again.
New Year's Eve arrives. Small parties can be organised, provided not too many people gather. There isn't enough Schnaps, but the mood is good. Improvised singers earn a few Reichsmarks. Girls and boys dance. Then midnight strikes. 1945 becomes 1946.
Satire returns
On 24 December 1945, something else appeared on Berlin’s streets: the first issue of Ulenspiegel.5 Herbert Sandberg—liberated from Buchenwald—and Günther Weisenborn—released from Luckau prison—created this satirical magazine together. Cultural resistance. A signal of new beginnings. The cover shows a painter at his easel, looking out the window in surprise: “Nanu, war da nicht eben noch das 1000-jährige Reich?”
“Wait, wasn’t there just a thousand-year Reich here a moment ago?”
Inside the first issue, a poem titled Weihnachten ohne Lametta ("Christmas without Tinsel") ends with these words:
"Thank God, what the Nazis strove / for has been swept away like loose sand. / The Wise Men from the East / survived the Führer's wisdom."6
Memories of those days differ. Heinrich Böll—author of “The Clown” and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature in 1972—remembered only the dust: powder of destruction, penetrating every crack, settling on books, manuscripts, nappies, bread, soup.
Others remembered their small attempts to celebrate again. Somehow they managed. With fake liverwurst and broomstick trees and dollhouses made from orange crates. With tears for the absent and small joys wrung from nothing. With the stubborn insistence that life continues, even in ruins. On Christmas Eve 1945, radio broadcaster Peter von Zahn spoke to his listeners:
“The German people must observe this first Christmas of peace very much alone. Alone, and in the poorhouse of the world.” But then he added: “We will have time to reflect thoughtfully, and we may then discover to our astonishment that we are not at the end of our possibilities.”7
This post is dedicated to those who still live under the bombs, ignored by those who have forgotten them—and to those who believe they are not at the end of their possibilities.
Sources:
Berliner Morgenpost, Wie Berlin nach dem Krieg Weihnachten feierte, 2013
Deutschlandfunk, Ohne Hoffnung und Lametta, 2015
MDR, Friedensweihnacht 1945, 2021
Claus Hinrich Casdorff, Weihnachten 1945, München 2020
German Exile Archive 1933-1945
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, „Schauplatz Berlin. 1945 bis 1948“
About Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and the resistance group “Uncle Emil”:
Provost Heinrich Grüber was an Evangelical theologian and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. He was particularly known for his work with the "Grüber Office," which helped persecuted Jews leave Germany between 1938 and 1940. After the war, he was appointed Provost of the Marienkirche in Berlin in 1945 and played an important role in rebuilding the Evangelical Church in Berlin. Later, Grüber became known as a witness at the Eichmann trials in Jerusalem.
In October 1945, German Protestant church leaders issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis)—a landmark statement confessing the church's failures and complicity under the Nazi regime, particularly its insufficient opposition to Hitler and the moral catastrophe of the Third Reich. Signed by the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) in Stuttgart, it was presented to the World Council of Churches (WCC). It marked a crucial step towards post-war reconciliation, acknowledging shared guilt with the German people and seeking new fellowship with the global church.
From the “Berliner Morgenpost”, 26.12.2013: Wie Berlin nach dem Krieg Weihnachten feierte, (How Berlin celebrated Christmas after the war)
«Erste Nachkriegsweihnachten (…) Wie anders hatten wir es uns gedacht.» Es gibt keinen Baum, kein Geschenk, und Leo lebt nicht mehr. «Nur dass seit vorgestern das curfew aufgehoben ist und man, wenn man Mut dazu hat, auch nach elf Uhr abends noch ausgehen darf.»
Ulenspiegel was a significant German satirical magazine published in Berlin from 1945 to 1950. It is regarded as a symbol of the democratic and anti-fascist new beginning in occupied Germany. See also: Wikipedia (German) and Deutschlandfunk: “Satire as consolation and weapon” (Satire als Trost und Waffe), 24.12.2020, in German, free to read.
"Gottlob, wonach die Nazis strebten, ist fortgefegt wie lockrer Sand. Des Führers Weisheit überlebten, die Weisen aus dem Morgenland."
“Das deutsche Volk muss diese erste Weihnacht des Friedens sehr einsam begehen. Einsam und im Armenhaus der Welt." .. "Wir werden Zeit haben, uns nachdenklich zu betrachten, und wir werden dann vielleicht zu unserem Erstaunen feststellen, dass wir nicht am Ende unserer Möglichkeiten sind."
Thanks you for all your Posts this year Valentina. I look forward to reading your Notes and Posts on Substack. Best Wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Health and happiness in your life. Peace throughout Europe and Beyond.