Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  With only three weeks until the target date, Wansierski—director of the Department for Security Questions of the Socialist Unity Party’s Central Committee—complained that he still lacked sufficient supplies for nearly two-thirds of the task. After taking inventory of “all available materials,” he reported that he was short some 2,100 concrete pillars, 1,100 kilograms of metal cramps, 95 fathoms of timber, 1,700 kilograms of connecting wire, and 31.9 tons of mesh wire. Most problematic, he lacked 303 tons of barbed wire, the project’s most essential raw material.

  Furious activity had filled all the supply gaps in the two weeks since Wansierski’s report. By August 9, Ulbricht was satisfied that everything was in place. Dozens of trucks had already transported hundreds of concrete uprights secretly from Eisenhüttenstadt, an industrial town on the Oder River near the Polish border, to a stockpile at a police barracks in the Berlin district of Pankow and several other locations.

  Several hundred police from across East Germany had assembled at the vast State Security Directorate compound at Hohenschönhausen on East Berlin’s outskirts. Many were constructing wooden sawhorses, known in German as “Spanish riders,” that would form the first physical street barriers. They hammered in nails and hooks from which others would string the barbed wire while wearing thousands of pairs of specially ordered protective gloves.

  Ulbricht was equally painstaking in determining which army and police units would be deployed. Beginning at 1:30 a.m., their first task would be to form a human chain around West Berlin to stop any spontaneous escape attempts or other acts of resistance until construction brigades could raise the first physical barriers. For this, Ulbricht would deploy only his most trusted forces: border police, reserve police, police school cadets, and crack troops known as factory fighting militia, organized around workplaces.

  Plans for each small section of the border detailed how they would operate. For example, Border Police Commander Erich Peter planned to deploy precisely ninety-seven officers at the city’s most important crossing point on East Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. That would produce the required density for that point of one man per square meter. His plan dictated that a further thirty-nine officers there would construct the initial barrier of barbed wire, concrete posts, and sawhorses.

  Regular army soldiers would form the second line of defense and would, in an emergency, move up to fill in any breaches in the forward line. The mighty fail-safe power of the Soviet military would stand back in a third ring, which would advance only if Allied forces disrupted the operation or East German units collapsed.

  Ulbricht’s lieutenants were just as meticulous in how they planned ammunition allocations, distributing it in sufficient quantities for the task but in a manner that was designed to avoid any reckless shooting. At the most sensitive border points, police units would be issued two five-bullet clips of blanks that would be loaded into their carbines in advance. They would have instructions to shoot the blanks as a warning should East Berliners or West Berliners rush them in a rage. Should the blanks fail in their purpose, police would have a further three clips of live ammunition in reserve. These they would load and fire only with the approval of commanding officers.

  On the second line of defense, soldiers of the National People’s Army would be armed with submachine guns and limited quantities of live ammunition. To avoid accidents, the soldiers would not preload their guns but instead keep the ammo inside satchels attached to their belts. Ulbricht’s insurance policy was that the most trusted units would be fully armed from the outset: the First Motorized Rifle Division, some factory militia, and two elite Wachregimenten—guard units that specialized in internal security—one from the army and the other attached to the Stasi (Staatssicherheit), the State Security Ministry.

  From the moment that police and military units received their first orders at 1:00 a.m., all East Berlin streetlights would be doused and they would have thirty minutes under the moonlight to close the border with their human chain. They would have a further 180 minutes to put up barriers around the city, including the complete closure of sixty-eight of the existing eighty-one crossing points to West Berlin. That would leave only a manageable thirteen checkpoints for East German police to monitor the following morning.

  At precisely 1:30 a.m., East German authorities would shut down all public transportation. They would prevent all trains arriving from West Berlin from unloading passengers at Friedrichstrasse, the main East–West station. At key crossings that would never reopen, teams equipped with special tools would split train tracks. Still other units would unroll and place the barbed wire while an additional eight hundred transport police beyond the usual staffing would man stations to dissuade unrest.

  If all went well, the whole job would be done by six a.m.

  Ulbricht cleared the final language for the official statement that he would circulate in the early hours of August 13 to all corners of East Germany and throughout the world. He would blame his action on the West German government’s “systematic plans for a civil war” that were being executed by “revenge-seeking and militaristic forces.” The statement said the “sole purpose” of the border closure was to provide East German citizens security from these nefarious forces.

  From that point forward, East Germans would be allowed to enter West Berlin only with special passes issued by the Interior Ministry. After ten days’ time, West Berliners again would be allowed to visit East Berlin.

  Ulbricht had not overlooked a single detail. Those who knew him best had seldom seen him so calm and content.

  SOVIET EMBASSY, EAST BERLIN

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 9, 1961

  Without emotion, Ulbricht walked Soviet Ambassador Pervukhin through his final preparations. “Comrade Cell” Ulbricht, so nicknamed in his younger years for his organizational skill, was in his element. He spoke without notes, as he had committed every aspect to his legendary memory. Despite the operation’s many moving parts, he still saw no sign that Western intelligence services either suspected what was about to happen or were planning countermeasures. Pervukhin would report to Khrushchev that the operation could proceed on the agreed-upon timetable.

  Khrushchev received the news with resignation and determination. The refugee exodus had reached the monstrous proportions of 10,000 refugees weekly and more than 2,000 on many individual days. The Soviet leader would recall later how he had agonized about the decision to go ahead. “The GDR had to cope with an enemy who was economically very powerful and therefore very appealing to the GDR’s own citizens. West Germany was all the more enticing to East Germans because they all spoke the same language…. 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.”

  Khrushchev had been forced to choose between an action that said nothing good about communism and a failure to act that might have prompted the crumbling of his western front. “I spent a great deal of time trying to think of a way out. How could we introduce incentives in the GDR to counteract the force behind the exodus of East German youths to West Germany? How could we create conditions in the GDR which would enable the state to regulate the steady attrition of its working force?”

  He knew that critics, “especially in bourgeois societies,” would say the Soviets had locked down East German citizens against their will. People would claim that “the gates of the Socialist paradise are guarded by armed troops.” But Khrushchev had concluded the border closing was “a necessary and only temporary defect.” Still, the Soviet leader remained certain none of this trouble would have been necessary if Ulbricht had more effectively tapped “the moral and material potential that would someday be harnessed by the dictatorship of the working classes.”

  But that was Utopia, and Khrushchev had to deal with the real world.

  He knew that East Germany, along with the Soviet U
nion’s other Eastern European satellites, had “yet to reach a level of moral and material development where competition with the West is possible.” He had to be honest with himself: There was no way to improve the East German economy rapidly enough to stem the flow of refugees and stop the collapse of East Germany in the face of such overwhelming West German material superiority.

  The only option was containment.

  EAST BERLIN

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1961

  Less than thirty-six hours before the operation was to begin, Soviet war hero Marshal Ivan Konev sat down for his first meeting with Ulbricht. To ensure discipline and success, Khrushchev had dispatched him to lead all Soviet forces in Germany, replacing General Ivan Yakubovsky, who he would slot in as his deputy. Khrushchev’s move was rich in symbolism. One of the great men of Soviet history was heading to Berlin for a return engagement.

  At age sixty-three, Konev was a tall, brutal, energetic man with a cleanly shaven bald head and wicked blue eyes with a knowing twinkle. During World War II, after having liberated Eastern Europe, his troops had swooped into the German capital from the south and conquered the Nazis, together with the soldiers of Marshal Zhukov, in the bloody Battle of Berlin of May 1945. For his heroics, he had won six Orders of Lenin, was twice recognized as “Hero of the Soviet Union,” and had then served as the Warsaw Pact’s first commander.

  Most appropriate for the task at hand, he had led the Soviet military crackdown in Budapest in 1956 that resulted in deaths of 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops. Some 200,000 Hungarians had fled the country as refugees. Given Konev’s past behavior toward Germans, Khrushchev also knew he would not shrink from the bloodiest decisions.

  Near World War II’s end, Konev had pursued a German division in retreat to the small Soviet town of Shanderovka. After surrounding the town to prevent the escape of German soldiers who had taken shelter there in a blizzard, he’d firebombed his enemies. His T-34 tanks then crushed under their tracks the evacuating German troops that his soldiers had failed to machine-gun down. The story went that his Cossack cavalry had then butchered the last survivors with their sabers, even cutting off arms that had been raised in surrender. His men killed some 20,000 Germans.

  Khrushchev had taken a risk in sending such a high-profile military commander to East Germany just a few days before an ostensibly secret operation. On the previous afternoon, General Yakubovsky had contributed to the provocative move by inviting the military liaison officers representing the three Western Allies in Berlin to meet his previously unannounced successor.

  “Gentlemen, my name is Konev,” the general had said to them in a gravelly voice. “You may perhaps have heard of me.”

  Konev savored the surprised look on the Western Allies’ faces as his statement was translated into their three languages by their three interpreters. “You are of course accredited to the commander in chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany,” he said. “Well, I am now the commander in chief, and it is to me that you will be accredited from here on out.” He asked the liaison officers to inform their commanders of the change and the fact that his friend General Yakubovsky would serve as his deputy.

  He asked if any of the three had questions. Initially speechless, the U.S. and British officers awkwardly conveyed the greetings of their commanders. The French officer, however, said he could not do the same because his commander was unaware either of Konev’s presence or his assumption of command.

  “As one soldier to another,” Konev said, smiling to the French officer, “let me tell you this, so that you can repeat it to your general. I have always reminded my officers that a commander should never be taken by surprise.”

  Given what would follow, the theater was rich.

  Konev lacked specific orders on how to respond should Western powers respond more aggressively than expected to the border closure. Khrushchev trusted his ruthless commander to make the right decision. Acting as Ulbricht’s direct superior, Konev reminded the East German leader that success required two nonnegotiable aspects. While closing the border, he said, East German units at no point could be allowed to disrupt the ability of West Berliners or the Western Allies to move by air, road, or rail to and from West Germany.

  Second, said Konev, the operation had to be as fast as the wind.

  Khrushchev had constructed the plan so that “our establishing of the border control in the GDR didn’t give the West either the right or the pretext to resolve our dispute by war.” To achieve that, Konev considered speed essential to create a fait accompli, to ensure the loyalty of East German forces, and to dissuade any trigger-happy American commander from improvising. A rapidly executed operation could also demonstrate to the West the impossibility of reversing the facts that communist troops would establish on the ground.

  THE VOLKSKAMMER, EAST BERLIN

  10:00 A.M., FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1961

  At age twenty-six, Adam Kellett-Long of Reuters was the only Western news correspondent based in communist East Berlin, and that suited him just fine. A gaggle of reporters fought over each shred of news in West Berlin, but he had the communist side to himself under an arrangement through which the East German government paid its bills to the news agency through supplying his office and accreditation. Ulbricht called Kellett-Long “my little shadow,” acknowledging his frequent presence.

  Still, the East German press office’s telephone call that morning was unusual, urging the young reporter to cover an emergency session of the Volkskammer, the country’s parliament, on Luisenstrasse at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, August 11. The British reporter usually skipped the Volkskammer’s mundane meetings, as his editors were unlikely ever to print a report on them. But if his East German minders were so eager for him to attend, there must be a reason.

  The council that day passed what Kellett-Long regarded as an “enigmatic resolution,” saying that its members approved whatever measures the East German government wished to undertake to address the “revanchist” situation in Berlin. It was an all-purpose rubber stamp for Ulbricht.

  Outside the meeting hall, Kellett-Long buttonholed his most reliable source, Horst Sindermann, who ran the Communist Party’s propaganda operations. “What is all this about?” asked Kellett-Long.

  Sindermann was less talkative than usual. He studied the young Brit through thick glasses, strands of dark hair combed across his balding head, then spoke in a measured, businesslike manner. “If I were you, and were planning to leave Berlin this weekend, I would not do so,” he said.

  The East German then disappeared into the crowd.

  Kellett-Long would later recall, “You could not have a stronger tip in a communist country that whatever was going to happen was going to happen that weekend.”

  The British reporter checked out news reports, but found no further clues. Sender Freies Berlin, the U.S.-funded West Berlin radio station, had that morning reported yet another record number of East Germans arriving at the Marienfelde emergency refugee camp. Kellett-Long had joked to his wife that, by his calculations, East Germany would be entirely empty by 1980 or so.

  The official East Berlin radio station Deutschlandsender didn’t report on refugees at all that day—or anything else that would help Kellett-Long. It was running a feature on the second human to orbit the Earth, Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who had circled the globe seventeen times in twenty-five hours and eighteen minutes before safely returning to Earth. The accomplishment was “unprecedented in human history,” the radio station said, noting that it further proved the socialist superiority that the refugee flood so stubbornly contradicted.

  In a further effort to follow up Sindermann’s tip, the British reporter drove to the Ostbahnhof, East Berlin’s main station for those arriving from elsewhere in East Germany, where he often tried to monitor the refugee flow. The number of travelers seemed greater than usual, but what struck Kellett-Long even more was the larger presence of uniformed and plain-clothes police.

  The police were aggressively working th
e crowd, fishing out dozens of travelers seemingly at random, arresting some and turning back others. The Brit scribbled in his notebook: “an escalated police operation.” However, it seemed to Kellett-Long that East German authorities were losing the battle, trying to hold back the sea with outstretched palms. He could see the tension in their eyes.

  Kellett-Long returned to his office and wrote a story that rang bells in editorial rooms around the world. “Berlin is holding its breath this sunny weekend,” he wrote, “waiting for drastic measures to stem the refugee flow to West Berlin.” Based on the Sindermann steer, he said authorities would be responding “imminently.”

  It was strong and pessimistic language, just the sort of brash report that had made Kellett-Long so unpopular with his superiors. But he was confident of it. Kellett-Long reckoned there were now several possibilities as to what could happen next. He listed them for his readers: East German authorities could tighten their controls on travelers. They could impose stiffer penalties on those apprehended while trying to flee. A far bigger story, of course, would be if the East Germans shut off transit routes altogether.

  Kellett-Long couldn’t imagine that alternative. Then he would be writing about a potential war.

  STASI HEADQUARTERS, NORMANNENSTRASSE, EAST BERLIN

  LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 11, 1961

  In the first briefing for his lieutenants ahead of their weekend work, Stasi chief Erich Mielke gave the historic moment its code name. “The name of this operation will herewith be known as ‘Rose,’” he said. He did not explain the reasoning behind the name, though the suggestion was that behind the tens of thousands of barbed-wire thorns was a plan of organizational beauty.

  Mielke exuded self-confidence. Though he was only five feet, five inches tall—about the same height as Ulbricht and Honecker—he was more powerfully built, more athletic, and more handsome than either of them. He wore a permanent five-o’clock shadow on his jowls and had bags under his dark eyes.