Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  The emphasis on West Berlin appeared all the more intentional to the Soviets five days after the speech when, on July 30, Senator William Fulbright said on the ABC Sunday-morning television talk show Issues and Answers that the Soviets could reduce tensions in the Berlin Crisis best by closing the West Berlin escape hatch for refugees. “The truth of the matter is, I think, the Russians have the power to close it in any case,” said Fulbright. “Next week, if they chose to close their borders, they could, without violating any treaty. I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their border because I think they have a right to close it.”

  Fulbright’s interpretation of the treaty was wrong, and he corrected himself in a statement to the Senate on August 4, saying that freedom of movement across Berlin was guaranteed by postwar agreements and that his TV interview had given “an unfortunate and erroneous impression.” That said, Kennedy never repudiated him, and McGeorge Bundy reported favorably to the president on Fulbright’s TV appearance by writing about “a variety of comment from Bonn and Berlin, including reference to the helpful impact of Senator Fulbright’s remarks.”

  The truth was that West Germans despaired at the comments, while East Germans were delighted at Fulbright’s suggestion. West Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel newspaper complained that the senator’s comment was potentially as encouraging for enemy action as Acheson’s words had been before the Korean War, when he had declared that South Korea was outside America’s defense perimeter. The Communist Party paper Neues Deutschland called Fulbright’s ideas “realistic.”

  Early in August, Kennedy mused about what was likely to happen next in Berlin during a stroll along the colonnade by the Rose Garden with Walt Rostow, an economist who was advising Kennedy. “Khrushchev is losing East Germany,” he said. “He cannot let that happen. If East Germany goes, so will Poland and all of Eastern Europe. He will have to do something to stop the flow of refugees. Perhaps a wall. And we won’t be able to prevent it. I can hold the Alliance together to defend West Berlin, but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.”

  MOSCOW

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 3, 1961

  On a sweltering Moscow morning, Ulbricht drove to his meeting with Khrushchev in a limousine whose windows were closed and curtained. Ulbricht had not announced his departure from Berlin for the emergency Warsaw Pact summit that day, and if he could avoid it, he did not want to be seen in public.

  Moscow seemed serene compared with what Ulbricht faced back home. Tourist groups walked behind guides around Red Square. The day’s first sightseeing boats rode up the Moskva River beside men in kayaks out for morning exercise. Giant swimming pools were opening up in public parks. With school out, the city was filled with parents and their children.

  Khrushchev and Ulbricht met to work out the final details for the border closure before approaching members of the Warsaw Pact for their approval. Ulbricht also wanted his allies to consider emergency economic support should the West respond with sanctions.

  The two men had been closely tracking the preparatory work of their security services and military forces for most of the previous month, so there was no need to review each detail. Khrushchev said they together would “encircle Berlin with an iron ring…. Our forces must create such a ring, but your troops must control it.” The Soviets were sending an additional 4,000 soldiers to Berlin even as the two men talked. Khrushchev told Ulbricht he was also putting tanks on the border with West Germany, behind East German soldiers’ positions.

  The purpose of their meeting that morning was to finalize the timing. Khrushchev said he wanted to put off the signing of any peace treaty with Ulbricht until after the border closure. He was also unwilling to let Ulbricht take any action against access routes or air routes to West Berlin. Ulbricht agreed that although he still wished to sign a war-ending peace treaty with Moscow, that had become secondary to stopping the refugees and saving his country. Ulbricht told the Soviet leader he needed only two weeks to be ready to stop movement between East and West Berlin.

  “When would it be best for you to do this?” asked Khrushchev. “Do it when you want. We can do it at any time.”

  Because of both the urgency of his refugee problems and the danger that plans could leak, Ulbricht wanted to move quickly. He suggested the night between Saturday, August 12, and Sunday, August 13.

  Noting that the thirteenth is considered an unlucky day in the West, Khrushchev joked that “for us and for the whole socialist camp it would be a very lucky day indeed.”

  Khrushchev, the builder of the Moscow Metro, wanted to hear more of the logistical details. How would Ulbricht deal with streets, which he had seen on his detailed map, where one side was East Berlin and the other West?

  “In those homes which have an exit to West Berlin, we will brick up the exit,” Ulbricht said. “In other places, we will erect barriers of barbed wire. The wire has already been assembled. All of this can be done very quickly.”

  Khrushchev refused Ulbricht’s request that he call for an emergency economic conference to prepare necessary support for the East German economy. The Soviet leader feared that merely scheduling such a meeting might tip off the West to their plans—and accelerate the refugee flow even further. Ulbricht would simply have to do his best to prepare.

  He also wanted Ulbricht to be certain that all operations remained strictly within his own territory, “and not a millimeter more” into West Berlin. Every signal Kennedy had sent Khrushchev, from the Vienna Summit to his July 25 speech to Fulbright’s television statement, had been that he was on safe ground as long as all Soviet and East German actions were limited to Soviet bloc territory and in no way interrupted Allied rights of access to Berlin. In fact, his most recent conversation with U.S. Ambassador Thompson had convinced him that Kennedy and Adenauer might even welcome the outcome. In a meeting two days earlier, he had told Ulbricht:

  When the border is closed, the Americans and West Germans will be happy. Thompson told me that this flight is causing the West Germans a lot of trouble. So when we institute these controls, everyone will be satisfied. And beyond that, they will feel your power.

  Without referring to the notion of a Berlin wall by name, Khrushchev asked the Warsaw Pact group to approve a border closure as impermeable as the one that had existed between East and West German territories since 1952. “We propose that the Warsaw Pact states agree, in the interests of the cessation of the subversive activity, to implement control along the GDR borders, including the borders in Berlin, comparable to that existing along the state borders of the Western Powers.”

  The three-day Warsaw Pact meeting that followed gave Ulbricht some but not all of what he wanted. His socialist neighbors accepted the border closure without dissent, and they agreed to reposition their troops to back up the Soviet military. What Ulbricht’s allies would not provide, much to Khrushchev’s consternation, was economic insurance. One Communist Party leader after the other—Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, Antonín Novotný of Czechoslovakia, and János Kádár of Hungary—worried about how the West might retaliate economically against the whole bloc and spoke of their limited resources. Gomulka even wanted Ulbricht to consider helping him should there be a Western boycott of the entire bloc by redirecting goods that might normally be sold to the West. He worried about how exposed Poland would be to any Berlin blowback because of its large debt and trade with the West.

  Novotný warned Ulbricht that he should not count on him for foodstuffs, because of his country’s problems with agricultural production. As Czechoslovakia had a greater share of its trade with the West than any other Warsaw Pact country, he feared his country would suffer most in the aftermath of any Berlin action. Kádár complained that the potential economic impact of an East German border closure had not been discussed among Soviet allies earlier, particularly as his country relied on trade with the West for nearly a third of its economy—and a quarter of that amount was with West Germany.

  Khrushchev fumed:

  I think we must
help the GDR. Let us, comrades, perceive this better, deeper and more keenly…. Now, comrades, we will all help the GDR. I will not say who of you will help most. All must help and must help more. Let us look at it this way: if we do not now turn our attention to the needs of the GDR and we do not make sacrifices, they cannot endure; they do not have enough internal strength.

  “What would it mean if the GDR was liquidated?” Khrushchev demanded to know from the leaders sitting before him. Did they want the West German army on their borders? By strengthening East Germany’s position, “we strengthen our position,” he said, frustrated at seeing how little solidarity existed within his bloc. In an alliance where most members felt little threatened by the West but were increasingly dependent upon it economically, Khrushchev’s arguments did not convince them.

  When fellow communist leaders asked Khrushchev why he didn’t worry more about American military response, Khrushchev told them the West had reacted far less resolutely than he had feared thus far to his escalating pressures and rhetoric. The U.S., he said, had “proved to be less tough than we assumed” regarding Berlin. Khrushchev said it was true the adversary still “could show himself, but we can already say now that we expected more pressure, but so far the strongest intimidation has been Kennedy’s speech.”

  Khrushchev told his allies it was his view that the U.S. was “barely governed,” and that the U.S. Senate reminded him of the medieval Russian principality of Novgorod, where the boyars “shouted, yelled and pulled at each other’s beards; that’s how they decided who was right.”

  He even spoke nostalgically of the time when the American secretary of state was John Foster Dulles, who although anticommunist provided “more stability” for the U.S.–Soviet relationship. As for Kennedy, Khrushchev said he “felt for him…he is too much of a lightweight for both Republicans and Democrats.” Khrushchev was confident his weak and indecisive adversary would not respond in any meaningful way.

  Ulbricht returned home as the countdown began for the most important day of his life—and that of his country. But first he would have to weather a final skirmish with the East German proletariat.

  Ulbricht and Kurt Wismach Lock Horns

  OBERSPREE CABLE WORKS, EAST BERLIN

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 1961

  With less than forty-eight hours to go before launching his operation, Walter Ulbricht nevertheless kept a routine appointment with laborers of the Oberspree Cable Works in the southern part of East Berlin. Some 1,500 laborers gathered in a giant hall, wearing work overalls and wooden shoes that protected them against electrocution and molten metal. Some climbed up the struts of cranes for a better view; others sat atop twelve-foot-high cable rollers.

  Reporting that he had just returned from Moscow, Ulbricht told his crowd, “It is imperative that a peace treaty be signed without delay [between East Germany] and our glorious comrade and ally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” In a combative voice, he said, “Nobody can stop socialism…. Not even those who have fallen into the clutches of the slave-traders.” He said the cost to the East German economy of the refugee flight, which he called “flesh trade and kidnappings,” was two and a half billion marks a year. “Every citizen of our State will agree with me that we must put a stop to such conditions.”

  Kurt Wismach, who at first appeared to Ulbricht to be just another one of the workers, boiled inside as he listened to what he considered the usual communist double-talk. Imbued with a false sense of strength as he sat far above Ulbricht on a roll of cables, he began to applaud derisively and at length after each of Ulbricht’s statements. It seemed that nothing could stop Wismach’s hands from clapping nor his voice from shouting into the silence of the hall around him.

  “Even if I am the only one to say it: Free elections!” he screamed.

  Ulbricht looked up at the worker and snapped back. “Now just a moment!” he shouted. “We’re going to clear this up right away!”

  Wismach shouted back at the leader whom millions so feared: “Yes, and we’ll see which is the right way!”

  Ulbricht shouted up at him and then turned to take in all those seated and standing in the hall around him. “Free elections! What is it you want to elect freely?…The question is put to you by the people!”

  By then Wismach spoke with the courage of a man who had gone too far to reverse himself. “Have you the slightest idea what the people really think?” he yelled, seeing that most of his coworkers’ hands were frozen at their sides. No one was coming to his support.

  Ulbricht waved his hands and barked back that it had been Germany’s free elections in the 1920s and 1930s that had brought the country Hitler and World War II. “Now I ask you: Do you want to travel along this same road?”

  “Nein, nein,” shouted a vocal minority of party loyalists in the crowd. With each additional rebuttal from Ulbricht and his request for the crowd to support him, this group shouted more encouragement to the communist leader.

  Other workers who might have sided with Wismach—likely the majority—remained silent. They realized that to do otherwise would expose them to whatever retribution their vocal fellow laborer would assuredly face.

  “The one lonely heckler thinks he shows special courage!” Ulbricht bellowed. “Have the courage to fight against German militarism!”

  The party faithful cheered their leader again.

  “Whoever supports free elections supports Hitler’s generals!” a red-faced Ulbricht shouted.

  The crowd applauded one last time as Ulbricht stormed out.

  The next day, party disciplinarians interrogated Wismach on, among other matters, his possible membership in Western flesh-trading and spy agencies. He was required to write a statement retracting his outburst, and he had to accept a pay cut and a demotion that could only be reversed through hard work and “political awareness.”

  Wismach left East Berlin as a refugee a few days later with his wife and child. He would be among the last to pass so easily.

  14

  THE WALL: SETTING THE TRAP

  The GDR had to cope with an enemy who was economically very powerful and therefore very appealing to the GDR’s own citizens…. The resulting drain of workers was creating a simply disastrous situation in the GDR, which was already suffering from a shortage of manual labor, not to mention specialized labor. If things had continued like this much longer, I don’t know what would have happened.

  Premier Khrushchev, explaining in his memoirs his decision to approve the Berlin border closure

  In this period we are entering, it will be shown whether we know everything and whether we are firmly anchored everywhere. Now we must prove whether we understand the politics of the party and are capable of carrying out its orders.

  Erich Mielke, chief of East German secret police, providing final instructions on August 12, 1961

  COMMUNIST PARTY HEADQUARTERS, EAST BERLIN

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9, 1961

  Like a veteran stage producer preparing for the performance of a lifetime, Walter Ulbricht rehearsed every scene with his lieutenants in the last crucial hours before his August 13 curtain call. His drama, code-named “Operation Rose,” would play for one night only. He would have no second chance to get it right.

  No detail was too small for Ulbricht’s attention nor that of the man he had deputized to direct the show, Erich Honecker, the Central Committee’s chief for security matters. At age forty-eight, Honecker had two qualities that had recommended him: unquestioned loyalty and unmatched organizational capability.

  With his combed-back, graying hair and Mona Lisa smile, Honecker had come a long way from his days as the young, handsome communist rabble-rouser who had spent a decade in Hitler’s jails during the 1930s. He knew his operation could catapult him past rivals to become the front-runner for Ulbricht’s eventual succession. It also could save German socialism. Failure would cost him his career and perhaps his country.

  Honecker’s final checklist was as long as it was precise.

&
nbsp; He needed to know whether his people had purchased sufficient quantities of barbed wire to wrap around West Berlin’s entire ninety-six-mile circumference. To avoid suspicion, Honecker’s team had distributed the barbed-wire orders among a number of innocuous East German purchasers and they, in turn, had negotiated with several different manufacturers in both Great Britain and West Germany.

  Thus far, none of their Western business partners had sounded an alarm. Honecker saw no evidence that Western intelligence agencies had any clue about what was about to transpire. A sales order was a sales order. Lenin’s prediction came to mind: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” In this case, the capitalists were peddling at bulk discounts barbed wire with which the communists would enclose their own people. To avoid any diplomatic backlash, Honecker’s people had removed hundreds of British and West German manufacturer labels from the barbed wire and burned them.

  East German teams and their Soviet advisers had mapped every meter of the twenty-seven-mile-long internal border that ran through the city center between West and East Berlin and the remaining sixty-nine miles that separated West Berlin and the East German countryside. They noted precisely what peculiarities faced them on each stretch of the border.

  On July 24, Honecker’s deputy, Bruno Wansierski, a fifty-six-year-old party technocrat and trained carpenter, had updated his boss on the massive construction project it was his job to oversee. To conceal its purpose, Wansierski’s report was innocuously labeled: “Overview of the Scope of the Engineering Operations on the Western Outer Ring of Berlin.” Those who would read the documents later would compare their precision to Nazi blueprints for building and operating concentration camps. Though Ulbricht’s project was less murderous, its execution would be no less cynically exacting.