The short answer is that no one would have helped you rebuild, and nobody would have subsidized the repairs. You would have been largely on your own.

The unexploded ammunition in your collapsed building might have attracted the interest and attention of the occupying militaries. Unfortunately, methods for disposing of unexploded ammunition in Berlin immediately after the war are not well-documented. (Anyone who finds further information on this topic, please weigh in!) Most probably, the local occupying military would have coordinated removing this. Unexploded bombs remain an issue across German cities to this day, however, so it is possible no one would have come to help you at all. But ammunition clearing is the most likely reason that authorities would have played a role in clearing out your ruined building.

Once it was clear that the building wasn’t going to explode, however, you were almost certainly on your own. One of the most famous images of postwar Berlin—and indeed, of many German cities in the postwar period—is that of the “Trümmerfrau” or Rubble Women. These were women who went around gathering up the crumbled remains of buildings destroyed by bombs and in street fighting, and carted them away to begin a city’s rebuilding process. Although a heroic image of women stepping up to help rebuild the country persists up to today in Germany, it is not the whole story. Women were only the primary source of rubble clearance in the Soviet zone of Berlin. There, they were not volunteers—instead, they were forced to clear rubble away by the Soviet occupiers, who considered the civilian German population responsible for the existence of the war, alongside the German military. (Some unemployed men were also pressed into rubble clearance in this zone, but more women than men were available, leading to a gender imbalance.)

In the other three Allied zones (the British, French, and American), penal labour was used for rubble clearance. German prisoners of war and former Nazi Party members—both male and female—were forced to clear the streets in these parts of Berlin. This was seen as an “atonement measure.” This was a direct reversal of Germany’s policy for clearing up bombing-related rubble created during the war, when foreign POWs and people held in concentration camps were used to clear up cities after Allied air attacks. The other source of rubble removal was professional – companies and individuals who had cleared rubble during the war were also contracted by Allied military administration governments after the war, sometimes using their own equipment that the Allies had confiscated and then were loaning back to them. This method was first and foremost used to clear public spaces, such as major roads and intersections.

So, in the east of Berlin, women might have helped to clear away some of the piles of rubble that spilled onto the streets and sidewalks from your building, while in the west, prisoners and former Nazi Party members would have done this work. However, any further repairs on the building would have been up to you, the owner. As Jeffrey Diefendorf (author of In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II) explained: “Individuals borrowed money, often from relatives in the country, and that is where they also found building materials. It was never centrally managed.” Unlike other countries that needed to rebuild, such as Japan and the Soviet Union, there was less centralization and planning, in large part because there was not a single central government running Germany. This meant that the centre was not issuing clear and timely directives or plans, and so people were left much more on their own.

The above description is true for anyone who did not have any affiliation with the Nazi Party. If, however, you were a party member – and particularly if you were a Nazi and were active in public life (i.e. a member of the SS, the police, or a civil servant), you might not have retained ownership of your building. One of the first things the occupying Allied powers did in Germany after the war ended was start a process known as “denazification.” This involved arrests for many (400,000 Germans were placed in internment camps and underwent case-by-case reviews between 1945 and 1950.) Others who had been lower down in the system had to fill out detailed forms explaining what they had done during the Nazi period. One of the penalties for people identified through the denazification process was being stripped of one’s property.

I say “might” not have retained ownership because denazification was unevenly and incompletely applied. Not anywhere near all Nazi Party members were caught, those who were did not usually go through rigorous investigations, and the entire denazification process ended relatively quickly. In West Germany, many former Nazis were able to reintegrate into public life within a few years. Others made surface-level changes to their identities and avoided the less-than-rigorous system of detection. And still others managed to get out of losing their property by transferring the rights to a non-Nazi Party member right before their denazification investigations/tribunals began. It was a deeply imperfect process.

As long as you had not been a Nazi Party member active in public life, then, you probably would have retained control of your building, and repairs would have been your own responsibility. On the other hand, within the Soviet zone of Berlin, in addition to former Nazi Party members, people considered political enemies were also sometimes arrested and interned. Therefore, if your building was located in this zone, it is possible you might have been targeted as a capitalist landlord. However, there were lots of people who opposed Communism in that zone, and the owner of a single apartment building may not have been rich or powerful enough to attract the attention of Soviet authorities. (Unless you treated your tenants poorly, and one or more of them reported you to the new Soviet military government to punish you. In that case, watch out! They might have investigated you.)

For anyone surprised to learn that rebuilding was this ad-hoc and individual in postwar Germany, it is worth noting two things. First, the famous Marshall Plan designed to “rebuild” Europe was primarily focused on rebuilding entire economies—not individual pieces of personal property. It operated at a government level, and individual residents of countries did not get cheques or funds from it directly. It also did not come into effect until late 1948 or 1949. As you can imagine, many people had already decided what they were going to do with their damaged buildings and homes years before that.

Second, for anyone surprised that this individualistic, deal-with-it-yourself attitude was also in place in the Soviet Zone (the eastern portions of the city that would become part of East Germany), it may be even more surprising to learn that ownership of real estate (“personal” property as the Communists preferred to call private property) remained legal throughout the entire duration of East Germany, explicitly protected in multiple constitutions written for the country. This was not in keeping with the spirit or the ideology of Communism, necessarily, but the Soviet Union had entrenched property ownership and struggled to move away from it, and as a result pushed all other Communist countries within the Warsaw Pact to follow their lead (both because they believed it was effective in keeping the population invested in the national project of Communism and to not make them, the Soviets, look bad.)

So, TL;DR – no one was swooping in to help repair war-damaged private property in postwar Berlin.

Sources: “Denazification,” Alliierten Museum, last accessed 14 May 2020, http://www.alliiertenmuseum.de/en/topics/denazification.html.

“How Did Germany Rebuild After World War II,” The Aleppo Project, 15 October 2015, last accessed: 14 May 2020,https://www.thealeppoproject.com/how-did-germany-rebuild-after-world-war-ii/

Betts, Paul, “Private Property and Public Culture: A Forgotten Chapter of East European Communist Life,” Histoire@Politique, 1, no.7 (2009).

Diefendorf, Jeffrey, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II, (New York: Oxford University Press,1993).

Treber, Leonie, “The Big Cleanup: Men, Women, and the Clearance of the Rubble in Postwar East and West German,” Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements, ed. Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Bruhofener.

Ziemke, Earl, THE U.S. ARMY IN THE OCCUPATION OF GERMANY, 1944-1946, (Washington D.C.: Center of Military History US Army, 1990).

And would it matter what occupation zone you found yourself in?