Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  If Ulbricht could control all access to West Berlin, he could also squeeze it and over time erode its viability as a free, Western city. Ulbricht knew he was suggesting something similar to Stalin’s failed Berlin Blockade of 1948, but he used Khrushchev’s own arguments that the Soviets would be more likely to succeed this time because Moscow had closed the gap on Western military superiority and faced a less determined adversary in Kennedy than had been the case with Truman.

  On three matters, Ulbricht demanded that Khrushchev make immediate decisions and announce them publicly.

  The tail was furiously trying to wag the bear.

  First, he wanted Khrushchev to issue a statement that Moscow would ratchet up Soviet economic assistance to the GDR to show the West that “economic blackmail” against his country could not succeed. Second, he appealed to Khrushchev to announce that there would be an East German–Soviet summit in April to raise the standing of Ulbricht and his country in negotiations with the West. Finally, he demanded that the Soviet leader convene a Warsaw Pact summit to rally Moscow’s allies to support East Germany militarily and economically. Thus far, Ulbricht complained, these countries had been unhelpful bystanders. “Although they report in the press about these problems,” wrote Ulbricht, “they basically feel uninvolved in this matter.”

  Ulbricht reminded Khrushchev that it was the Soviets who had stuck East Germany with such an impossible starting point from which Ulbricht now had to defend the Kremlin’s global standing. “We are a state,” he lectured Khrushchev, “which was created without having and still does not have a raw material base, and which stands with open borders at the center of the competition between two world systems.”

  Ulbricht groused to Khrushchev that the Kremlin had deeply damaged East Germany during the first ten postwar years by extracting economic resources through reparations, including the complete withdrawal of factories, while the U.S. had built up West Germany through the enormous financial support and credits of the Marshall Plan.

  Perhaps reparations had been justified at the time, Ulbricht conceded, given all of the Soviets’ wartime suffering and the need to strengthen the Soviet Union as the world communist leader. But now, Ulbricht argued, Khrushchev should recognize how much such measures had damaged East Germany in its competition with West Germany. From the war’s end through 1954, Ulbricht said, the per capita investment in West Germany had been double that in East Germany. “This is the main reason that we have remained so far behind West Germany in labor productivity and standard of living,” he wrote.

  In short, Ulbricht was telling Khrushchev: You got us into this mess, and you have the most to lose if we don’t survive, so now help get us out. Ulbricht escalated the economic demands he had made in November, which Khrushchev had mostly accepted. “The booming economy in West Germany, which is visible to every citizen of the GDR, is the primary reason that in the last ten years around two million people have left our republic,” he said, adding that it was also what allowed the West Germans to apply “constant political pressure.”

  An East German worker had to labor three times as long as a West German to buy a pair of shoes, if he could find them at all. East Germany had 8 cars per 1,000 people, compared with 67 per 1,000 in West Germany. The East German official growth rate of 8 percent came nowhere near measuring the real situation for most citizens, since the figures were inflated by heavy industrial exports to the Soviets that did nothing to satisfy consumers at home. The result in 1960, when West German per capita income was double that of East Germans, was a 32 percent increase in refugees, from 140,000 to 185,000, or 500 daily.

  Because of all that, Ulbricht appealed to Khrushchev to dramatically reduce the remaining East German reparations to the Soviet Union, and to increase supplies of raw materials, semifinished goods, and basic foodstuffs like meat and butter. He also sought new emergency loans, having already asked Khrushchev to sell gold to help East Germany. “If it is not possible to give us this credit, then we cannot maintain the standard of living of the population at the level of 1960,” he wrote. “We would enter into such a serious situation in supplies and production that we would be faced with serious crisis manifestations.”

  Ulbricht’s message to Khrushchev was clear: If you don’t help now and urgently, you will face the prospect of another uprising. Khrushchev had barely survived the 1957 coup attempt that had followed Budapest, so Ulbricht knew the Soviet leader could not ignore his warning.

  Ulbricht was combining maximalist demands with threats of dire consequences if Khrushchev failed to act. His letter might offend the Soviet leader, but that was the least of Ulbricht’s worries. Khrushchev’s failure to act could bring the end of East Germany—and of Ulbricht.

  On the same day, Ulbricht sent an indirect but just as unmistakable message through Khrushchev’s nemesis: Beijing.

  Ulbricht did not seek Khrushchev’s permission, nor did he provide prior notice before dispatching a high-level mission to China’s capital, led by Politburo member and party loyalist Hermann Matern. Given Ulbricht’s insider knowledge of Khrushchev’s ugly dispute with Mao, it was an unfriendly act in both timing and execution.

  It was only the inescapable flight route through Moscow that alerted the Soviet leadership to the mission. Yuri Andropov, then the Politburo member responsible for Socialist Party relations, asked to be briefed on the trip during the delegation’s airport layover. Matern insisted the mission’s purpose was purely economic, and Ulbricht knew Khrushchev could not object at a time when East Germany’s needs were growing and the Kremlin was complaining about the cost of satisfying them.

  But everything about the trip’s timing and choreography was political. In China, the group was received by Vice Premier Chen Yi, Mao’s confidant and a legendary communist commander during the Sino-Japanese War and marshal of the People’s Liberation Army. He told Matern that China regarded its Taiwan problem and Ulbricht’s East German problem as having “very much in common.” They both involved areas of “imperialist occupation” of integral pieces of communist countries.

  In a direct challenge to Khrushchev, the East Germans and the Chinese agreed to assist each other in their efforts to recover these territories. The Chinese view was that Taiwan was the eastern front and Berlin the western front of a global ideological struggle—and Khrushchev was faltering in both places as world communist leader. Beyond that, Chen promised that China would help get the Americans out of Berlin because the situation there affected all other fronts in the global communist struggle.

  Chen reminded the East Germans that communist China had shelled the Taiwanese islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1955, causing a crisis during which Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs had considered a nuclear response. This happened, he said, not because China had wanted to increase international tensions, but rather because Beijing had needed “to show the USA and the whole world that we have not come to terms with the current [Taiwan] status. We as well had to remove the impression that the USA is so powerful that no one dares to do something and one must come to terms with all of its humiliations.”

  His suggestion was that the same determination was now necessary regarding Berlin.

  The warmth of the East German–Chinese exchange was in sharp contrast to the Sino–Soviet chill that had set in. Ulbricht knew from his November meeting with Khrushchev in Moscow how competitive the Soviet leader felt toward Mao, and he had already played that card to successfully increase Moscow’s economic support. Khrushchev had declared at the time that he would provide East Germany with the sort of economic assistance Mao could not, creating joint enterprises with the East Germans on Soviet territory—something the Soviets had done with no other ally. “We aren’t China,” he declared to Ulbricht. “We are not afraid of giving the Germans a boost…. The needs of the GDR are our needs.”

  Three months later, the Chinese were becoming an ever greater problem for Khrushchev, despite the apparent truce he had negotiated with them at the November gathering of Communist Parties i
n Moscow. While the East Germans were in Beijing seeking economic assistance, China was in Tirana encouraging xenophobic Albanian leader Enver Hoxha to break with the Soviet Union. During the Fourth Congress of the Albanian Communist Party, from February 13 to 21, Albanian communists had torn down public portraits of Khrushchev and replaced them with those of Mao, Stalin, and Hoxha. Never had a Soviet leader suffered such humiliation in his own realm.

  Ulbricht’s course of greater diplomatic pressures on Khrushchev had its risks.

  The far more powerful Khrushchev might have decided it was finally time to replace Ulbricht with a more submissive and obedient East German leader. He might have decided the China mission had crossed some impermissible line. However, Ulbricht had gambled correctly that Khrushchev had no good alternatives.

  THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW

  MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 1961

  Khrushchev’s response landed on Ulbricht’s desk twelve days after the East German leader had written to him and, by coincidence, on the day of John F. Kennedy’s State of the Union speech. Given the impertinence of Ulbricht’s demands, Khrushchev’s letter was surprisingly submissive.

  The Soviet leader reported to Ulbricht that the Central Committee “has discussed your letter carefully” and that Moscow’s leaders agreed with much of it. The fact that Khrushchev had shared it with party bosses showed that he recognized the gravity of Ulbricht’s criticisms and the urgency of his requests. That said, Khrushchev again asked Ulbricht to contain his mounting impatience.

  “Currently, we are beginning to initiate a detailed discussion of these questions with Kennedy,” he wrote. “The probe which we carried out shows that we need a little time until Kennedy stakes out his position on the German question more clearly and until it is clear whether the USA government wants to achieve a mutually acceptable resolution.”

  The Soviet leader conceded that the extreme measures Ulbricht had suggested in his letter “under the circumstances” would prove necessary. “If we do not succeed in coming to an understanding with Kennedy, we will, as agreed, choose together with you the time for their implementation.”

  Ulbricht had achieved less than he had sought, but more than he might have considered probable. Khrushchev again would ratchet up economic assistance. The Soviet leader would also convene a Warsaw Pact meeting on Berlin. Of all Ulbricht’s demands, Khrushchev refused to agree only to the East German–Soviet summit.

  Khrushchev had accepted Ulbricht’s diagnosis of the problem, and he had not rejected the steps Ulbricht had suggested toward a cure. Ulbricht could be satisfied that he had penetrated and influenced Soviet Communist Party thinking on Berlin at the highest levels.

  Khrushchev was still buying time to work the new American president. However, Ulbricht had put all the pieces in place to move forward decisively at the moment Khrushchev’s efforts to negotiate a Berlin deal with Kennedy failed. And the East German leader was certain they would.

  In the meantime, Ulbricht would put his team to work on contingencies.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1961

  The clouds were already gathering around the U.S.–West German relationship when Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano di Tremezzo walked into the Oval Office with his satchel full of Adenauer’s concerns.

  For several years, Americans had been warming to the West Germans, impressed by their embrace of U.S.-style freedoms. Now, however, public opinion was turning more negative again, fed by media reports about the impending trial in Israel of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and publicity around William L. Shirer’s best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with all its sordid new details about the not-so-distant German past.

  The West German foreign office had warned Adenauer at the beginning of the year: “There are still some resentments and suspicions which lie dormant under the surface, but which are ready to break out under certain stimuli.” In exasperation at the shifting mood, West German ambassador Wilhelm Grewe told a group of U.S. journalists at a conference of the Atlantik-Brücke, an institution created to bring the two countries closer, that they had “to choose whether they consider us as allies or a hopeless nation of troublemakers.”

  Kennedy’s briefing papers for the Brentano meeting warned the president that his visitor was coming to express Adenauer’s concern that his administration might sell out West German interests in Berlin in exchange for a deal with the Soviets. “The Germans are acutely aware that vital aspects of their destiny are in hands other than their own,” said the position paper, signed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. It advised Kennedy to both reassure Brentano of continued U.S. commitment to West Berlin’s defense and share with him as much of the president’s thinking as possible about the possibility of Berlin negotiations with Moscow.

  Given past experience, however, U.S. officials distrusted their West German partners’ ability to keep a secret. American intelligence services assumed that their West German counterparts were infiltrated and thus unreliable. “While frankness is desirable particularly in view of the chronic German sense of insecurity,” the Rusk memo said, “the German government does not have a good record for retaining confidences.”

  Detractors said that Brentano—a fifty-seven-year-old bachelor whose life was his job and its trappings—was little more than the genteel, cultured instrument of the strong-willed Adenauer, and the foreign minister did little to alter this impression. Adenauer was determined to run his own foreign policy, and no independent actor could remain long in Brentano’s job. Where Brentano and Adenauer did differ was their attitude regarding Germany’s European calling. While Brentano was of a younger generation that considered Europe as Germany’s natural destiny, Adenauer regarded European integration more as a means of suppressing German nationalism.

  Kennedy opened what would be a stiff meeting with Brentano by speaking from a script about “the appreciation of the U.S. government for the cooperation and friendship of the German government during the past years.” He very much wanted to arrange a meeting soon with Adenauer, he said, and hoped “that all mutual problems would be worked out satisfactorily.”

  Adenauer’s political opponent Willy Brandt had already manipulated matters so that he would arrive in Washington ahead of Adenauer in March for a personal meeting with Kennedy, a breach of the usual protocol that put the head of an Allied government before any city mayor. Rusk had supported the Brandt visit to keep “freshly before the world our determination to support West Berlin at all costs.” He wanted the Adenauer meeting to follow as closely thereafter as possible to avoid giving the impression that Kennedy favored Brandt in upcoming German elections, which of course he did.

  Kennedy reassured Brentano that his failure to mention Berlin by name in the inaugural address or in his State of the Union, a matter that had become such an issue in the German press, “did not by any means signify a lessening of United States interest in the Berlin question.” He said he had merely wanted to avoid provoking the Soviets at a time of relative calm in the city. Kennedy told the foreign minister that he expected Moscow to renew pressure on Berlin in the coming months, and he wanted Brentano’s suggestions about how one could best counter “the subtle pressures” Moscow was likely to exert.

  Brentano said Berlin’s absence from Kennedy’s speeches was of such little concern that it had not even been in talking points Adenauer had given him. He agreed there was no reason yet to raise the Berlin question, but added, “We would have to deal with it sooner or later.” Brentano frowned, declaring, “The leaders of the Soviet Zone cannot tolerate the symbol of a free Berlin in the midst of their Red Zone.” He told Kennedy that East German leaders “will do all in their power to stimulate the Soviet Union to action with regard to Berlin.”

  On the positive side, Brentano estimated that 90 percent of the East Berlin population opposed the East German regime, which he called the region’s second-harshest communist system after that of Czechoslovakia. His message was that the
people in both Germanys heavily favored its Western version and therefore would over time support unification.

  Kennedy probed deeper. He worried the Soviets would unilaterally sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and then cut short West Berlin’s freedom, maintaining the status quo for only a brief period in order to mollify the West.

  Brentano agreed such a course was probable, so Kennedy asked what the NATO allies should do about it.

  Brentano described to Kennedy his chancellor’s “policy of strength” approach, and said the Soviets would “hesitate to take drastic steps with regard to Berlin as long as they know that the Western Allies will not tolerate any such steps.” As long as Kennedy remained firm, he said, the Soviets “may continue to threaten but will not take any actual steps for some time to come.” However, Brentano agreed that recent U.S. setbacks in the Congo, Laos, and Latin America all increased the chance that the Soviets would test Kennedy over Berlin.

  As if to prove Brentano’s point, Khrushchev simultaneously escalated pressures on Adenauer in Bonn.

  FEDERAL CHANCELLERY, BONN

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1961

  Ambassador Andrei Smirnov’s urgent requests for meetings with Adenauer were seldom good news.

  It was invariably Smirnov, Khrushchev’s envoy in Bonn, who was the vehicle for the Soviet leader’s bullying. So the West German chancellor was already apprehensive upon receiving Smirnov’s demand for an immediate meeting, considering that its timing coincided with his foreign minister’s visit to the White House.