Russian workers threw lilac bouquets on tanks: from the memories of Kurt Maetzig.
Photo: Kurt Maetzig
The photo chemist Kurt Maetzig (born in 1911) and his wife Marion Keller (born in 1910) operated a small photo laboratory in Werder on the Havel on the Havel on the Havel in which they researched the possibilities to regain silver content from the emulsion of cinema films. That was considered a war and protected them.
In the immediate vicinity of her laboratory, a former pub that was generally called “mausediele”, on the Friedrichshöhe, there was a camp with Soviet prisoners of war and a camp with forced labor. Loose, quasi illegal contacts developed between the laboratory people and the “foreigners” of these two camps.
They were coordinated by a Poland that was called Janek, who often met Maetzig. Janek came in the laboratory, sometimes with a handcart, sometimes as an installer with tools and the like, and they quickly discussed the most important thing. One of the Soviet prisoners, the cuisine of the camp, in the civilian engineer, later saved himself into the laboratory when the prisoners broke out of the warehouse a few days before the liberation, so as not to be killed at the last moment.
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The so -called foreign workers contacted the Russians. Then stuck in Werder handwritten notes on the trees, on which stood that the Soviet troops would move into Werder the next morning. The population was asked to stay in their houses.
Shortly before the expected arrival of the Red Army, Marion Keller and Kurt Maetzig came to the laboratory, among them Poland, French, Belgian and Dutch – and the hidden Russian also came to light. Together with the foreign workers, they had a red flag improvised from a pillow ininet. They awaited the Red Army on May 3, a wonderful spring day. You know that from the records of the two.
From afar, a quiet and then swelling roar of armored chains sounded. Then you heard the screaming and screaming of many female voices. It was the Soviet forced laborers who were housed in the former dance hall on the Friedrichshöhe. They now came down the long stairs and tore flied lilac branches off the bushes. When the tanks got, they threw them down in front of them, waved the soldiers sitting on the tanks, screamed and cried.
With the red pillow flag in hand, surrounded by the forced laborers from different countries and a Russian prisoner in the midst of cheering and crying Soviet women in the maisonne of May 3, 1945, five days before the surrender of fascist Germany, Kurt Maetzig and Marion Keller finally experienced liberation.
After that, more and more forced laborers, Dutch, French, Poland and Kurt came to the laboratory. All of them ate a festive dinner on this memorable May 3. And they left Marion and Kurt a kind of protective letter so that they were not thought to be Nazis in which they confirmed human contact between them.
After the liberation, Keller and Maetzig returned to Berlin. Maetzig became a co-founder of the DEFA and created significant feature films (“Before in the shadow”, “I am the rabbit”), Marion Keller led the defa-week show “of the eyewitness” for many years. The two did not forget their very personal experiences on the day of liberation.
The Akademie der Künste keeps the estate of Kurt Maetzig, which the estate Marion Kellers handed over the daughter Claudia Köpcke to the film museum Potsdam
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