Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, August 30, 1961

  HUMBOLDT HARBOR, EAST BERLIN

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 1961

  Günter Litfin, a twenty-four-year-old tailor whose boldest acts until that point had been performed with a needle and thread, summoned the courage to flee East Berlin eleven days after the communists had sealed the border.

  Until August 13, Litfin had lived divided Berlin’s ideal life, taking maximum advantage of each side’s benefits as one of the city’s 50,000 Grenzgänger, or “border jumpers.” By day, he worked in West Berlin earning hard Westmark, which he exchanged on the black market at a five-to-one rate for East German money, or Ostmark. He worked out of an atelier near West Berlin’s Zoo Station, where he had already become a tailor to show-business greats: Heinz Rühmann, Ilse Werner, and Grete Weiser. Actresses in particular were drawn to his boyish manner, dark eyes, and curly black hair. At night he retreated to a comfortable East Berlin apartment in the Weissensee district, which he rented cheaply for those plentiful Ostmark.

  Overnight, Litfin’s dream life became a nightmare. The border closure prevented him from traveling to West Berlin, so he lost his job and his social position. Worse yet, an East German–mandated job placement process was about to land Litfin in a mind-numbing textile factory job with longer hours and a fraction of his previous pay.

  Litfin damned himself for not moving to West Berlin when he had had the chance. A few days before the border closed, he had even rented a studio apartment in West Berlin’s Charlottenburg district on the leafy Suarezstrasse. He and his brother had been slowly transporting his household goods in small loads, using two different cars, to avoid police suspicion. They had already smuggled out his most precious belonging, his modern sewing machine, by dismantling it and moving it in pieces.

  Even more maddening was that Günter Litfin had been at a house-warming party in West Berlin with his brother, Jürgen, on the night the city was divided. When they’d returned home on the elevated S-Bahn at just past midnight, they had noticed nothing amiss.

  It wasn’t until the next morning at 10:00 a.m., after Jürgen had heard the bad news on the radio, that he woke up his brother: “All access routes are closed and everything is shut down,” he told Günter. The two brothers then reflected on the last time Ulbricht had shut down Berlin’s border: on June 17, 1953, after Soviet tanks had put down the worker uprising. Life had returned to normal several days later, so they expected the same was likely this time. Even during the 1948 Berlin Airlift, the city’s border had remained open. The Litfins at first dismissed the notion that the Americans would allow the border closure to stand, given all that was at stake. Though the brothers distrusted the British and French commitment to Berlin’s freedom, they had little doubt that the Americans would come through.

  The Litfins set off on their bicycles to size up the new landscape. They rolled to a stop at Günter’s usual border crossing at the Bornholmer Bridge, where a two-lane highway passed over multiple train tracks. Police had blocked the pavement with barbed wire and tank traps. Günter sighed to his brother, “I can’t believe this will stay.”

  But with each successive day the brothers grew more convinced the Americans would not rescue them. The communists had begun replacing the temporary barriers of sawhorses and barbed wire with a ten-foot-high wall built of prefabricated concrete sections and connecting mortar. Ulbricht was rapidly closing all escape hatches. So Günter decided to risk escape before it was too late.

  He closely followed the reports on RIAS radio about the many escapes that had succeeded after August 13. Since then, some 150 East Germans had swum to their liberty across the Teltow Canal, many towing children. In a single action, a dozen teenagers had made it across the waterway in a group sprint. One daring young man had driven his Volkswagen right through one border section’s barbed wire safely into the French sector. Another bold East Berliner had disarmed a border guard, taking his sub-machine gun right out of his hands so that he could not shoot, and then had run across the border with it.

  Encouraged by these success stories and despite a heart condition, Litfin decided to act. At just after four in the afternoon on Thursday, August 24, in the spotlight of a 77-degree midday sun, Günter crossed a railway yard that lay between Friedrichstrasse in the east and the Lehrter train station in the West. Wearing a light brown jacket and black pants, he jumped into the warm waters of the Spree Canal at the Humboldt harbor. Günter wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer, but he reckoned that he was strong enough to make it across the thirty meters or so of water to freedom.

  Standing above him on a nearby bridge, a transit policeman, or Trapo, shouted five times at Günter to stop. But the tailor only swam with more determination. The officer fired two warning shots that struck the water just beyond Günter’s head. When Litfin continued to swim, the Trapo sprayed machine-gun fire all around him. The first bullets struck the tailor when he was still ten meters short of the shore.

  Wounded, Günter flailed and dived deep to avoid subsequent shots from what by then were three police. When he came up for air and raised his hands in surrender, the Trapos screamed derisively at him. A shot pierced his neck, and Günter sank like a stone.

  Günter Litfin would be the first person shot dead while trying to escape East Berlin, a victim of bad timing. What he couldn’t have known was that police that morning had received their first shoot-to-kill orders to stop all those attempting the crime of “flight from the Republic.” Had Litfin fled a day earlier, he would have succeeded. Instead, two East German fireboats carrying police units searched the Spree Canal for more than two hours before three army frogmen pulled Günter’s body from the water at about seven p.m.

  The day after Günter was killed, eight secret police tore apart his mother’s apartment while she wept uncontrollably. They ripped off her oven door and disassembled the oven. They slashed open mattresses and dumped out dresser drawers. An officer explained to Günter’s wailing mother, “Your son has been shot dead. He was a criminal.”

  To further punish the family, authorities prohibited Günter’s mother and brother from viewing the body before its burial, not even for identification. The family lowered Günter into his grave in a closed casket at Weissensee Cemetery on a bright summer day, Wednesday, August 30. Jürgen was satisfied with the polished black granite headstone he had chosen, and he ran his fingers across its gold script: OUR UNFORGOTTEN GÜNTER.

  Hundreds of Berliners gathered at the graveside: school friends, family members, and dozens of others who didn’t know Günter at all but had come to make a statement by their presence.

  Even with so many watching, Jürgen could not let his brother disappear without confirming it was really him. So he jumped down into the grave site and broke open the coffin with a crowbar that he had concealed until that moment. Though Günter’s skin had blackened and a bandage covered a broad area beneath his mouth and over his neck, concealing the large exit wound from the shot that had killed him, Jürgen had no doubt about the identity.

  He looked up and nodded to his mother that it was her son.

  Berlin was in shock in the days following August 13. The city passed through stages of grief: denial, disbelief, rage, frustration, depression, and ultimately resignation. How Berliners responded depended on where they sat, in the East or the West.

  For West Berliners, initial anger at the communists was now accompanied by a growing fury over American betrayal. The talk around town was all about how the Americans had not sent a single platoon on August 13 to demonstrate solidarity, nor had they imposed a single sanction on the East Germans or Soviets to punish them for their action.

  By comparison, the East Berliner response was one of self-loathing for having missed the opportunity to escape mixed with disgust for the cynical communist leaders who had imprisoned them. Mielke’s omnipresent Stasi agents had succeeded in their mission. Those who might have considered rebellion were deterred by the constant watch kept by Stasi agents at every factory, schoo
l, and apartment building.

  AT THE BORDER, BERNAUER STRASSE, EAST BERLIN

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 15, 1961

  A little more than two days after the border closure, East German workmen operating giant cranes began to lower prefabricated concrete segments onto Bernauer Strasse. Each block was precisely 1.25 meters square and 20 centimeters thick. Hundreds more sat nearby on a flatbed truck. Satisfied that the U.S. and its allies were unlikely to do anything to upset his project, Ulbricht was taking the next step. He had issued orders for construction crews to begin replacing the temporary border barriers in several sensitive locations with something more lasting.

  CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr rushed to Bernauer Strasse to tell the story. “We noticed slabs of concrete being moved into place as though to build a wall,” he said tentatively, among the first to employ the term “wall” to describe what eventually would divide Berliners. With his distinctive baritone laced with disbelieving emotion, he compared it to what Germans had built in Warsaw to contain Jews.

  Schorr tried to explain to his American listeners why the U.S. military was watching passively while the communists made the figurative Iron Curtain a physical reality of concrete and mortar. “We might have been willing to go to war to defend our right to stay in Berlin,” he said, “but can we go to war to defend the right of East Germans to get out of their own country?”

  Construction crews had also begun operating at Potsdamer Platz, laboring under huge floodlights that allowed round-the-clock work. However, it was Bernauer Strasse that would become both the focus and the symbol of Ulbricht’s intention to make Berlin’s divide both permanent and impermeable.

  A fluke of prewar planning had put Bernauer Strasse directly on the dividing line between the East Berlin district of Mitte, in the Soviet zone, and the West Berlin borough of Wedding, in the French sector. Until 1938, the demarcation line had been down the middle of the cobblestoned, kilometer-long Bernauer Strasse, but in that year Wedding’s street cleaners protested. To simplify their job, Berlin’s Third Reich authorities expanded Wedding’s territory to the edge of the four-story apartment buildings on the street’s eastern side so that their cleaners could rule over the entire thoroughfare.

  As a result, Berlin’s Cold War division left Bernauer Strasse’s pavement and the apartment buildings on its northern side in West Berlin, and all the homes on the southern side in East Berlin. So in the first two days after August 13, these East Berlin residents could escape to the West—depending on their apartments’ locations in their buildings—either by walking out the front door or climbing down a rope or sheet through an open window.

  Like many of the soldiers dispatched to East Berlin for Operation Rose, nineteen-year-old Hans Conrad Schumann was born in rural Saxony, where his father had raised sheep in the village of Leutewitz. These were roots that authorities knew from experience would make young Schumann less politically susceptible. Yet as Schumann patrolled the East German side of the border along Bernauer Strasse on August 15, he failed to see the threat to his socialist homeland that he had been instructed to resist. Instead, all he saw were justifiably angry, unarmed protesters shaking their fists and shouting that he was a pig, a traitor, or—more hurtful, given the German past—a concentration camp guard.

  It had been a confusing experience, as Schumann had felt greater sympathy for the crowd than for the soldiers who then dispersed them with smoke bombs and water cannons. It was then that Schumann began to consider his own escape. At the fast pace the construction crews were working, Schumann thought to himself, within days a concrete wall would replace all the barbed-wire fencing that still marked most of the border on Bernauer Strasse. Within weeks, all of East Berlin would be enclosed, and his chance would be gone.

  As he visualized his flight, Schumann pressed down on the top of the coiled wire where he was standing watch and tested how much it would give against what amount of pressure.

  “What are you doing there?” asked a colleague.

  Though Schumann’s heart beat wildly, he responded calmly.

  “The wire is rusting already,” he responded. It had the benefit of truth.

  A young photographer began to watch Schumann from a few paces away in West Berlin. Peter Leibing, working on behalf of the photo agency Conti-Press in Hamburg, had rushed the 160 miles to Berlin to capture history as it unfolded. The images were powerful: East German soldiers cradling submachine guns, crying women, angry and sad faces, all framed through strands of barbed wire. When Leibing arrived at the epicenter of this drama, Bernauer Strasse, he joined a large crowd of West Berliners who had already gathered to watch the wall’s construction. Standing on a corner of Ruppinerstrasse in the West, Leibing looked through his lens at Conrad Schumann as he stood against a building in the East, smoking a cigarette. Some in the crowd told Leibing they had watched Schumann return to the barbed-wire coil on several occasions, always pushing the wire down a little farther to test its resistance to pressure.

  The larger his audience, Schumann thought to himself, the greater the chance of a safe escape, since his colleagues would be less likely to shoot him as he fled. Schumann shouted at a young West Berliner who was approaching the border that he should get back. But then he confided to the same individual under his breath, “Ich werde springen” (I’m going to jump).

  The young man raced off, and before long a police van pulled up as closely as possible without attracting the suspicion of the other East German soldiers. Leibing trained his lens on the spot in the barbed wire that Schumann had been testing. It struck him as ironic that he was using an East German camera, an Exakta. The longer he waited, the more it seemed to Leibing that Schumann had lost his courage or never intended to jump.

  At about 4:00 p.m., Schumann saw his two colleagues disappear around a corner and out of sight. He tossed away his cigarette, raced forward, and jumped onto the top of the coil with his right boot, pressing down just hard enough to propel himself forward but not to sink into the concertina wire. As he soared, he released his Kalashnikov submachine gun with his right hand while extending his left arm for balance. It looked to the cheering crowd as if he were extending his wings for flight. His flat steel helmet remained steady on his head as he pulled his neck into his shoulder. Like a champion hurdler, he landed on his left boot and then ran without shortening his stride up to and then through the Opel Blitz police van’s open door.

  Drawing upon his previous experience photographing horse jumps in Hamburg, Leibing snapped a photo that perfectly captured the soldier in flight over the obstacle beneath him. His manual shutter would give him only one shot, but that was enough to produce an iconic photo.

  “Welcome to the West, young man,” said a West Berlin police officer to a shaking, silent Schumann, and he collapsed in the van.* The door slammed shut and the vehicle sped away. It was but a brief triumph.

  Within a week, Ulbricht had grown so confident that Kennedy would not intervene that on August 22, he began to expand his wall construction to multiple sites. Though history would record August 13 as the Berlin Wall’s birthdate, the truth was that it rose only gradually in the days that followed, once the communists could be certain they would face no resistance.

  RATHAUS SCHÖNEBERG, CITY HALL OF WEST BERLIN

  4:00 P.M., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16, 1961

  Willy Brandt had never been so worried before a speech.

  As he stood before the Rathaus Schöneberg, he looked down on 250,000 angry Berliners and knew it would be difficult to strike the right tone. He had to channel the crowd’s rage, but not so ferociously that it incited them to storm across the border, only to be shot down.

  He also knew this crucial moment was a campaign opportunity. Elections were only one month off, and Brandt wanted to show Germans that he could more effectively defend their interests than the aging Chancellor Adenauer, who with his American friends had done nothing to stop the border closure nor reverse it. Adenauer had turned down Brandt’s invitation to join him at
the rally, and he had not set foot in Berlin since August 13.

  Thus far, Adenauer had resisted pressure from his party and the public to visit the city because, he said, his appearance might incite political unrest and encourage false expectations. What he didn’t say was that it would also underscore his impotence. Adenauer was also eager to avoid giving the Soviets any excuse to expand on their success and threaten West Berlin or West German freedoms—a line Moscow had been careful not to cross.

  So while Brandt prepared for his speech, Adenauer met in Bonn with the Soviet ambassador to West Germany, Andrei Smirnov. He agreed to sign a communiqué the Soviet had brought to the meeting: “The Federal Republic would not undertake any step that could damage its relationship with the Soviet Union or endanger the international situation.”

  It reeked of appeasement.

  Within forty-eight hours of the border closure, Adenauer had announced that he would not cut trade ties with East Germany, reversing his initial threats. Even his hawkish defense minister Franz Josef Strauss had appealed for calm. “If shooting starts,” he told a West German crowd, “no one knows with what kind of weapons it will end.”

  British Prime Minister Macmillan, the ally so reluctant to provoke the Russian bear, had praised Adenauer for having responded with a “heated heart and cool head.” It seemed as though, after all his concern about Kennedy’s leadership, Adenauer was now adopting the U.S. president’s position on the wall.

  However, Adenauer’s response was one more of resignation than conviction. He had seen his worst fears realized regarding Kennedy’s indecisive leadership. Heinrich Krone, the chairman of Adenauer’s party faction in the Bundestag, wrote in his diary, “This was the hour of our greatest disillusionment.” The building of the wall ended whatever residual confidence Adenauer had that membership in “the strongest alliance in the world” could guarantee absolute security.

  He was also taking the long view. His West Germany remained intact and anchored in NATO. There was no advantage in denying the reality that East Berlin had landed ever more securely in communist hands. Therefore, his most important purpose was to win the September 17 elections and keep his country out of socialist control.