Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Back in 1931, at only twenty-four years of age, Mielke had begun his thuggish communist career with the murder of two Berlin police officers who had been lured to a political rally for the planned hit in front of the Babylon Cinema. After the killings, Mielke crowed among comrades at a local pub, “Today we celebrate an act that I have staged!” (“Heute wird ein Ding gefeiert, das ich gedreht habe!”) Party comrades smuggled Mielke out of Germany, where he was convicted in absentia. He then began his education and training in Moscow as a Soviet political intelligence officer.

  Mielke had run East German state security since 1957, but the coming hours would be the most crucial test yet for his elaborate apparatus of 85,000 full-time domestic spies and 170,000 informants. Most of his senior officers, gathered in the canteen at secret police headquarters, had known nothing about the operation until that moment.

  “Today we begin a new chapter of our Chekist work,” he told them, with one of his frequent references to the Cheka, the original state security arm of the Bolshevik revolution. “This new chapter demands the mobilization of each individual member of the State Security Forces. 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.”

  Mielke kept fit, drank little, and didn’t smoke, but he had three indulgences: a passion for Prussian marching music, hunting on private grounds he kept for top communist officials, and the success of the security forces’ soccer team, Sportsvereinigung Dynamo, which would regularly win championships with the help of his manipulation of matches and players. Yet none of that compared with the game he was fixing now.

  He told his officers that the work they were about to perform would “demonstrate the strength of our republic…. What is the main thing to remember: always be watchful, demonstrate extreme efficiency and eliminate all negative occurrences. No enemy must be allowed to become active; no conglomeration of enemies must be permitted.”

  He then issued instructions for the weekend ahead. They ranged from how to control individual factories to assessing precisely the “enemy forces” on a district-by-district level. He wanted secret police present within the armed forces to ensure combat readiness and political loyalty through the closest possible contact to officers. “Whoever may confront us with antagonistic actions will be arrested,” he said. “Enemies must be seized outright. Our goal is to prevent all negative phenomena. Enemy forces must be immediately and discreetly arrested…if they become active.”

  Mielke had taken leadership after the June 1953 failure of his mentor Wilhelm Zaisser to stop worker protests from spreading. Back then, soldiers and police had in many cases joined ranks with the protesters. Strikes had spread like waves across the country, and it had taken Soviet tanks and troops to restore order.

  Mielke was determined to preclude all such problems by anticipating them and dousing dissent before it gained momentum.

  EAST AND WEST BERLIN

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961

  It was like any other summer weekend for most Berliners.

  The weather was a pleasant 75 degrees (24 degrees Celsius), with just enough cloud cover to provide relief from the sun. After the downpours of the previous week, Berliners gathered at sidewalk cafés, in parks, and at lakeside beaches.

  One neighborhood near Berlin’s East–West border had been closed to traffic, but it was for the annual Kreuzberg Kinderfest, or children’s fair, on the Zimmerstrasse. Flags and streamers decorated the narrow street, where children from all sectors of Berlin were laughing, playing, and begging their parents for ice cream and cake. Doting adults tossed children wrapped candies from their apartment windows above the streets.

  Most Allied military officers had taken the day off to be with their families. Some steered sailboats on the Wannsee and up it through the undulating Havel. Major General Albert Watson II, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, played golf at the Blue-White Club, where membership was part of occupation rights.

  The Severin + Kühn company tour buses were having a bumper day showing off the Cold War’s epicenter to tourists, including stops in the Soviet sector. They instructed passengers not to photograph certain public buildings but urged them to snap as many shots as they liked of the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, with its statue of a giant Red Army soldier cradling a German baby in one arm while crushing a swastika with his boot.

  The biggest story of the day in West Berlin papers was that of the record inflow of refugees. A flat nasal voice at the Marienfelde refugee center provided the count over loudspeakers for all who were waiting in line—“seven-hundred sixty-five, seven hundred sixty-six, seven hundred sixty-seven”—to reach more than two thousand by day’s end.

  Church workers, members of civic clubs, and other volunteers, including the spouses of Allied forces, had gathered to help feed hungry refugees and console weeping babies. The camp’s facilities overflowed, so refugees had been distributed around the city to sleep in church naves and in classrooms on military camp beds and hospital cots. Heinrich Albertz, Mayor Brandt’s chief of staff, telephoned George Muller, the deputy political adviser at the American Mission, to ask for field rations, as Marienfelde had run out of food. “The matter just can’t continue like this,” he said.

  Muller extracted several thousand C rations from the U.S. garrison to help. They would last only a few days, but Albertz would take what he could get.

  Not since 1953 had West Berlin seen such a stampede. Marienfelde’s twenty-five three-story apartment blocks were filled to bursting, as were twenty-nine other temporary camps set up to absorb the flood. Twenty-one daily charter flights were ferrying thousands of the new refugees from West Berlin to other parts of West Germany where jobs were plentiful.

  Yet none of that was sufficient to manage the human tide. Processors had all but given up trying to sift out real from bogus refugees, among them certainly dozens of East German spies that Ulbricht’s foreign intelligence chief Markus Wolf was planting in the West.

  As dark settled over Berlin, a fireworks display for the children’s festival illuminated the sky. Dancing couples on the rooftop terrace of the new Berlin Hilton stopped to take in the pyrotechnics. West Berlin movie houses were sold out that weekend, and more than half of the customers were East Berliners. It was no wonder, considering the hits they could see for a mark and twenty-five pfennigs in Eastern or Western currency: The Misfits, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, at Atelier am Zoo; Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston; or The Old Man and the Sea, with Spencer Tracy, at the Delphi Filmpalast. Or they could watch For Whom the Bell Tolls, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, at the Studio on Kurfürstendamm, or The Third Man, with Orson Welles, at the Ufa Pavillion.

  On a live stage, Leonard Bernstein’s new musical, West Side Story, was taking West Berlin by storm. East Berlin also had its stage attractions. Hundreds of West Berliners crossed each evening to see the latest Bertolt Brecht performance at the famous Berliner Ensemble, or political cabaret in the Distel. Some made the trip for cheap drinks at places like the Rialto Bar in the northeast Pankow district, which had no closing hour.

  Soviet troops were restricted to barracks that night, due to nonfraternization policies. However, British, French, and American soldiers were doing the town, enjoying their considerable attraction to Berlin girls whose own German men had far less pocket money to entertain them. The First Welsh Regiment had gathered at a British sector dance hall. The French had a dance floor at the Maison du Soldat. American GIs gathered in their own service clubs and favorite pubs—and as so often on Saturdays, they would make it a long and liquid night.

  NUREMBERG, WEST GERMANY

  SATURDAY EVENING, AUGUST 12, 1961

  Berlin’s mayor Willy Brandt launched the final phase of his national campaign for chancellor in Nuremberg in Bavaria, some one hundred miles north of Munich. Before 60,000 voters on the city’s cobbled market square, he
attacked his opponent Adenauer for refusing to engage him in a public debate of the Nixon–Kennedy variety.

  In a raspy, emotional voice, the forty-seven-year-old mayor rhetorically asked the crowd why so many refugees came to West Berlin every day. “The answer,” he said, “is because the Soviet Union is preparing a strike against our people, the seriousness of which only a very few understand.” He said East Germans fear “the Iron Curtain will be cemented shut” and they will be left “locked into a giant prison. They are agonizingly worried that they might be forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of indifference and lost opportunities.”

  As prophetic as he was poetic, Brandt fired another shot across the bow of his opponent Adenauer. “Today we stand in the most serious crisis of our postwar history, and the chancellor belittles that matter….”

  He called for all Germans on both sides of the divide to join in a plebiscite about their future, confident they would choose a democratic, Western course. If East Germans could not be included in such a referendum, West Germans and West Berliners should vote on their own, he said. “We also have a claim to self-determination,” he said, in reference to Germany’s wartime defeat, “not because we are better than others, but rather because we are no worse than other people.”

  The crowd cheered wildly, wanting even more of Brandt when he retreated in exhaustion to the two railway carriages that had been carrying him from one campaign stop to another. The train would drive overnight to Kiel on the North Sea coast.

  While Brandt was in Nuremberg, Adenauer was campaigning closer to his Bonn home in Lübeck. His less focused, more meandering speech asked East Germans to stop their westward stampede and stay home, helping to prepare East Germany for unification.

  “It is our duty,” he said, employing the emotive German concept of Pflicht, “to say to our German brothers and our German sisters on the other side of the zone border: Don’t panic.” Germans together would someday overcome their difficult separation, he said, and become as one again.

  GROSSER DÖLLNSEE, EAST GERMANY

  5:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961

  Walter Ulbricht appeared uncharacteristically relaxed to guests attending his garden party at Grosser Döllnsee, some twenty-five miles outside Berlin. The government guest quarters, known as “House Among the Birches,” had once served as the hunting lodge for Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring, something Ulbricht’s guests knew but did not mention.

  Ulbricht’s party had a dual purpose. First, he was quarantining government officials who would later sign off on his operation in an environment that he could hermetically seal. Second, he was executing a diversionary maneuver. Any Western intelligence agency monitoring his movements would report that East Germany’s leader was throwing a summer party at his countryside retreat.

  His guests speculated among themselves about why they had been summoned. Some noticed a larger-than-usual number of soldiers and military vehicles in the woods surrounding the guesthouse. But none of them had risen in Ulbricht’s hierarchy by asking too many questions.

  The August sun beat down as they gathered in the shade of birch trees in the meadow beside a serene lake. For those who remained inside, Ulbricht was showing a film, the popular Soviet comedy with the German title of Rette sich wer kann! (or Each Man for Himself), about the chaos aboard a Russian freighter carrying lions and tigers.

  Only a handful of Ulbricht’s guests knew that at four p.m. their boss had signed the final order that gave Honecker the green light to put Operation Rose into motion. Standing by his side had been the crucial players in that evening’s chain of command: Politburo members Willi Stoph and Paul Verner, who ran the government; Defense Minister Heinz Hoffmann; Minister of State Security Erich Mielke; Minister of Interior Karl Maron; Minister for Transport Erwin Kramer; People’s Police President Fritz Eikemeier and his chief of staff Horst Ende.

  While standing before them, Honecker had briefed his senior officers on their assignments for the evening, and none had raised any questions or objections. He had then provided each of them their written instructions, having signed them as he would all the other orders for that evening: “With socialist greetings, E. Honecker.”

  HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS

  MIDDAY, SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961 (6:00 P.M. IN BERLIN)

  Apparently unaware of what was occurring in Berlin, President Kennedy was trying to beat the 90-degree heat on Cape Cod with a midday boat outing. He had spent Saturday morning reading reports that followed up on Friday discussions about how to prepare for a possible Berlin crisis with Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense McNamara.

  The day’s diplomatic traffic contained some reason for concern.

  Khrushchev had given a speech at a Soviet–Romanian Friendship Rally a day earlier, and the U.S. embassy in Moscow worried about his blatant threats “of complete destruction” of NATO members Greece, Italy, and West Germany should war break out. At the same time, Khrushchev had talked more emphatically than before of Soviet willingness to provide guarantees of access to West Berlin and ensure noninterference in the city’s internal affairs.

  Both could be viewed as messages to Kennedy—a stick and a carrot.

  Secretary of State Rusk had sent a sharply worded cable to U.S. Ambassador to Germany Dowling that began, “The situation in East Germany is causing us increasing concern.” He warned that an “explosion along 1953 lines at this time would be highly unfortunate.”

  He feared that such an uprising, in response to the danger of “the escape hatch being closed,” would come “before the military and political measures now under way for dealing with the Berlin problem have become effective.” He said, “It would be particularly unfortunate if an explosion in East Germany were based on the expectation of immediate Western military assistance.”

  He wanted Dowling to report on what the West German government thought about the “likelihood of early explosion” and “what action it contemplates to prevent one, and what action by the U.S. and other Allies it would consider useful.” He reminded Dowling to tell the West Germans “that as a matter of policy, the Allies should do nothing to exacerbate the situation.”

  Despite such clear worries about coming trouble, Kennedy set his papers aside at midday and, with the sun burning through the overcast sky, set off on his motorboat into Nantucket Sound with his wife, three-year-old Caroline, and Lem Billings, his longtime friend and New York advertising man. The president dropped anchor in Cotuit Harbor after the Coast Guard and police boats cleared a swimming area for the First Family. Jackie set aside her pink parasol and jumped into the water dressed in a blue-and-white bathing suit.

  The latest report on Khrushchev’s activities included little of interest. The Soviet leader had left for a weekend retreat in the Crimea, where he was preparing for his October Party Congress, and the word was that he planned to be away until the first week of September. More excitement was swirling around the New York Yankees’ extraordinary baseball year. Mickey Mantle had just hit his forty-fourth homer and Roger Maris his forty-second.

  After a four-and-a-half-hour cruise, the Kennedys returned to their private dock, where they swam, joined by Caroline in an orange life jacket. The Los Angeles Times reported that although “the president did not swim vigorously…he showed no trace of his recent back ailment when he agilely climbed a ladder at the stern of the Marlin.”

  While soldiers in East Germany were secretly loading trucks with tank traps, barbed wire, pillars, and sawhorses, Kennedy drove his white golf cart into Nantucket village, where he bought Caroline and four of her cousins some ice cream at a local candy store. Jackie looked like something out of a fashion magazine in her blue blouse and red shorts.

  EAST BERLIN

  7:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961

  Reuters correspondent Kellett-Long had created such a stir with his Friday story, in which he had predicted an imminent Berlin event, that his news editor David Campbell had flown in that afternoon to track the story perso
nally.

  By early evening on Saturday, the two men were still searching for factual confirmation of Kellett-Long’s apparent scoop. “You put us out on a real limb here,” Campbell told his young reporter. “Something better happen.”

  In rereading his story, Kellett-Long wondered whether he should have used somewhat less hyperbolic language. He and Campbell drove around East Berlin in his car, looking in vain for the crisis he had predicted. Yet all Kellett-Long saw was a beautiful day with crowded swimming pools and overflowing cafés.

  Perhaps it would happen later in the evening, the reporter told his boss.

  PEOPLE’S ARMY HEADQUARTERS, STRAUSBERG, EAST GERMANY

  8:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961

  General Heinz Hoffmann, who was both East German defense minister and army commander, stood proudly before his officers. At age fifty, he looked like something out of a World War II film, standing ramrod-straight in his perfectly pressed uniform with eight rows of medals, wavy blond hair with gray streaks, combed back. With his square and high cheekbones, he was almost too handsome.

  Like so much of the East German leadership, he had been a rambunctious young communist in prewar Germany. Convicted of assault during anti-Nazi demonstrations, he had done hard jail time. In 1937 and 1938, Hoffmann had been seriously wounded while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, where he had served in an international brigade under the cover name Heinz Roth. After two years in an internment camp, he’d moved to the Soviet Union, where he had been educated for his future work. In 1949, he had taken charge of creating the East German armed forces that he would now deploy against their own people.

  Beside him stood his most impressive workhorse officer, Ottomar Pech, a man of a quite different background who had fought in the Third Reich’s Wehrmacht before his capture by the Russians on the Eastern Front. His job was to train the most elite military units and oversee coordination between the secret police and the military, which would be so crucial that evening.