Berlin 1961
Page 44
Swelling with confidence, the following day Ulbricht shrugged off objections from Soviet Ambassador Pervukhin and also reduced crossing points that Westerners could use from seven to only one, Checkpoint Charlie at Friedrichstrasse.
Two days later, Pervukhin and Konev summoned Ulbricht to reprimand him for these unilateral measures. The Soviets, Pervukhin said, could not accept the concept of a no-man’s-land running into West Berlin territory, which “could lead to a clash between the GDR police and the forces of the Western powers.”
So Ulbricht reversed those orders, protesting to his Soviet counterparts that he had “no intention of interfering” in West Berlin affairs. It was an easy compromise to make, as he had won more rights over Berlin than he had dared imagine at the beginning of the year. However, he refused to back off his decision to reduce the Western crossing points to just one.
As would happen so often in 1961, the Soviets ceded the point to Ulbricht.
TEMPELHOF AIRPORT, WEST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 1961
Chancellor Adenauer finally surfaced in Berlin, but only ten days after the communists had shut down the Berlin border, and after Vice President Johnson and General Clay had safely left town. Only a few hundred people cheered Adenauer when he landed at Tempelhof Airport, and perhaps only another 2,000 awaited him when he arrived for a visit to the Marienfelde refugee camp.
Many West Berliners demonstratively turned away from him as he drove through the city. Others held signs that criticized how he had handled the crisis. One typical placard read SIE KOMMEN ZU SPÄT—“You’ve come too late.” Another said sarcastically, HURRAH, THE SAVIOR HAS COME. At Marienfelde and elsewhere, the signs suggested voters would punish him for his weak response to the border closure.
When he viewed the wall at spots along the border, the Ulbricht regime taunted him from the eastern side from a loudspeaker truck, comparing him to Adolf Hitler while pointing a high-pressure water hose in his direction. At another spot along the way, however, older East Germans wept and cheered as they waved white handkerchiefs by way of greeting.
Adenauer visited the king of West German media, Axel Springer, who had built his headquarters beside the Berlin border, and whose BildZeitung, West Germany’s largest-circulation newspaper, had been most critical of Adenauer and American impotence during the border closing. “Herr Springer, I don’t understand you,” said the chancellor. “Nothing has changed here in Berlin” except that the media was stirring the pot more.
He warned Springer that his newspaper’s antics might revive National Socialism.
Springer stormed from the room in anger.
BERNAUER STRASSE, EAST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1961
Berliners grew accustomed to their post-Wall reality with surprising speed. The refugee outflow came to an almost complete halt as escape attempts became riskier and border controls tightened. In increasing numbers, West Berliners were relocating to West Germany rather than taking a chance that the Soviets might not be done quite yet.
At Bernauer Strasse, tour buses visited and dozens of Berliners continually loitered on the Western side of the border, observing their street’s post–August 13 phases: the initial border closure, the removal of Bernauer Strasse’s East Berlin residents, the bricking up of windows and doors, and the construction of the Berlin Wall.
West Berlin police officer Hans-Joachim Lazai and his colleagues had strung a rope between trees near Bernauer Strasse beyond which they would not allow spectators to pass. But on some days the crowd grew so angry that it was difficult to restrain them. Guilt overcame Lazai on the occasions when the hard stream of the police water cannons was required to keep back West Berlin crowds. Far worse were the times when Lazai had to stand by and watch East German border police arrest and cart away those who tried to escape. Following his orders to remain in place and provoke no one, he felt “a sense of helplessness as I stood across from complete injustice.”
Worst of all were the tragic deaths of those desperate days. The first one that Lazai witnessed was that of Ida Siekmann, who on August 21, just one day before her fifty-ninth birthday, became the first fatality at Bernauer Strasse. Lazai had been turning left onto the street on his way to work when he saw a dark ball descend from one of the buildings. Siekmann had thrown her mattress from the third-floor window ahead of herself in a vain hope that it would absorb her fall.
She had died instantly.
After that, West Berlin police used reinforced, sheetlike fireman nets in which they could catch jumpers. Nevertheless, would-be refugees had to jump with great accuracy, as the sixteen men who typically gripped the nets’ edges could not move quickly enough in any direction to compensate for an errant leap.
It was nearly eight on the evening of October 4 when Lazai first shouted through the dark at Bernd Lünser, a twenty-two-year-old East Berlin engineering student, to jump into just such a net from the roof of a four-story apartment building at Bernauer Strasse 44.
For some time, Lünser and two friends had been trying to summon the nerve to rappel down to West Berlin from the rooftop, using a clothesline they had brought with them. By shouting their encouragement, a growing crowd of West Berliners below alerted nearby East German police to their flight attempt.
Gerhard Peters, a nineteen-year-old member of the East German border police contingent, led the pursuit after gaining access to the roof through a trapdoor. Lünser pulled off roof tiles and threw them at Peters, who, after a short time, was joined by three other officers. After a dramatic chase, Lünser’s two friends were taken into custody by police after falling and sliding down the roof into a protective rail.
When one of the East German police shot at the would-be refugees, West German officers below pulled their pistols and exchanged twenty-eight shots with the East Germans. Under orders only to use their guns defensively, the West German police later argued that they had only acted once they had been fired upon.
Given a last chance to escape after a West Berlin policeman’s bullet struck the pursuing East German officer in the leg, Lünser broke free and ran. Some in the crowd shouted for him to throw the policeman off the roof. Others, including Lazai, shouted for him to jump into the outstretched net. When the student finally leapt, he caught a foot on a rain gutter and fell headfirst to the ground some twelve feet from where the men held out their net.
He landed with a deathly splat.
Lazai would later condemn his own role in the incident: “Man, you drew him out into his own death.”
On the following day, East German authorities sent roses to the border policeman Peters. East German Interior Minister Karl Maron decorated him for his sacrifice in fulfilling his duty. A headline in the West Berlin newspaper BZ sneered, DECORATION FOR MURDER.
Regine Hildebrandt, who lived nearby at Bernauer Strasse 44, had seen many failed and successful escape attempts by the time Lünser died that day.
As she wrote in her diary, she smoked a cigarette from a pack that had been pulled up by rope to her window in a basket given to her from West Berlin friends, a basket that also contained oranges, bananas, and other goods: “some small condolence for a ruined life.”
“Two huge West German tourist buses just drove by,” she wrote. “Yes, we’ve become Berlin’s number-one tourist attraction. Oh how gladly we’d just be ignored! How gladly we’d turn back the wheels of time and leave things the way they were! Oh, not again! Another bus. This is a ghastly time in which we live. Our lives have lost their spirit. Nobody enjoys work or life anymore. A petulant feeling of resignation hangs over all of us. There is no point. They will do with us as they like, and we can do nothing to stop them.
“Bow your heads, friends, we are all become sheep. Two more buses. Countless faces looking our way, while we sit with balled fists in our pockets.”
Berlin had some unlikely heroes in the days that followed, but their efforts failed as often as they succeeded.
Eberhard Bolle Lands in Prison
Before buttoning closed his light blue jacket, Bolle felt to confirm that the two identity cards were in its inside pocket. Though it was not a particularly warm day, he was sweating uncontrollably. His mother adored his disarming smile, but at the moment Bolle wore only a troubled frown.
The first of the two identity cards in his pocket was his own, and he would show it if asked when he crossed into East Berlin. Under the rules after the border closing six days earlier, West Berliners could still cross freely into the Soviet zone with ID. What Bolle planned to do with the second West Berlin identity card was to help the escape to the West of his friend and fellow Free University student Winfried Kastner,* with whom he shared a love of American jazz music. Like most other Berlin students that summer, they had also spent a great deal of their vacation time listening to Ricky Nelson’s latest hit, “Hello Mary Lou,” which had taken West Berlin by storm.
Though the Free University was in West Berlin, about a third of all its 15,000 students before August 13 had been East Berlin residents. Overnight, the border closure had ended their studies. For Kastner it was a particular disappointment, as he was in his last year of history studies and would not be accepted into an East German school because his family was considered politically unreliable. So Bolle was bringing him the ID of a West Berlin friend who closely resembled Kastner, and their simple plan was that he would use it to show border police as he crossed into West Berlin.
Bolle was an apolitical, conservative student who lacked any natural taste for danger, and on the day after the border closure he had refused to help another classmate escape. What had changed his mind since then was Willy Brandt’s speech before City Hall on August 16, which had so impressed him that he had written its call to action in his diary. “We now have to stand tall,” Brandt had said, “so that the enemy does not celebrate while our countrymen sink into despair. We have to show ourselves worthy of the ideals that are symbolized in the Freedom Bell that hangs above our heads.”
Two days later, Kastner’s mother had been in tears as she appealed to Bolle to help her son during a visit he had made to their apartment in the East Berlin district of Köpenick. Rumors were flying that the border controls would grow gradually tougher, she said, and so anyone who wanted to leave East Berlin had to do so immediately. Though she and her husband did not want to be separated from their son, she said they had to think first about how to best satisfy his dream of becoming a history professor, which he would never fulfill in the East.
Bolle had suggested that his friend swim across one of the canals, but Kastner protested that he was too poor a swimmer for that. Kastner insisted the safest way of escape was by getting access to a West Berlin ID, so he provided Bolle a photo of himself and the name and contact details of a Catholic priest who was said to be producing such documents.
After the priest refused Bolle, the philosophy student turned to a friend who looked like Kastner. He was happy to part with his ID, which he would replace after reporting it lost. However, he refused to make the delivery to East Berlin himself, since it would be too risky to try to return west without it. Speaking with false confidence, Bolle declared he would transport the ID himself. “They don’t hang people they can’t catch,” he boasted.
On the evening before his risky mission, Bolle had asked his mother if she would help someone escape if she were in his position. Only if it were a family member or a close friend, she had replied. His father admired his son’s good intentions, but he worried that his boy Eberhard had too panicky a nature to succeed.
“Now eat something,” said his father. “Who knows when your next meal will be?” Bolle forced down a few bites while his father tested him on how he would respond if East German police discovered the second ID. His responses were unconvincing, so they both hoped it would not come to that.
Bolle got out of the commuter train at Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, where all travelers heading for East Berlin disembarked. Perspiring and trembling, he sighed with relief as border guards waved him through. He was on the last couple of stairs out of the station when a border guard appeared from his right and took him firmly by the arm.
Several years later, after interrogation, trial, conviction, and imprisonment, Bolle would still wonder why the guard had been able to pick him from the crowd for arrest. Sadly, he knew the answer.
Fear had given him away.
It would take the return of a retired U.S. general to help restore West Berliners’ courage.
16
A HERO’S HOMECOMING
We have lost Czechoslovakia. Norway is threatened…. When Berlin falls, western Germany will be next. If we mean…to hold Europe against Communism, we must not budge…. If America does not understand this now, does not know that the issue is cast, then it never will and Communism will run rampant. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay.
General Lucius Clay, making his case to superiors on why the U.S. must stay in Berlin, April 10, 1948
Why would anyone write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?
President Kennedy to journalist Elie Abel, in response to a request to write a book on his presidency, September 22, 1961
TEMPELHOF AIRPORT, WEST BERLIN
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1961
General Lucius D. Clay’s triumphal return to Berlin came on an unseasonably warm and sunny September afternoon.
Berlin’s myriad outdoor cafés, often closed by late September, overflowed their sidewalks. The Berlin Zoo reported record business. A gentle breeze blew a flotilla of sailboats across the Wannsee, Berlin’s broad city lake, and the several waterways to which it was connected. The war years, the city’s division, and now the Wall had only heightened Berliners’ penchant for savoring pleasurable moments.
That said, it was more General Clay’s arrival than the weather that buoyed West Berlin spirits that day. Locals regarded President Kennedy’s decision to appoint Clay as his “personal representative” to their city as the most convincing proof yet that America remained determined to defend West Berlin’s freedoms. Certainly, Berliners concluded, a man of Clay’s pedigree would never have accepted the job unless he was convinced that Kennedy was finally ready to stand up to the Soviets.
In 1948, as Military Governor for the U.S. Zone in Germany, Clay became a German folk hero for ordering and executing, with the British, the airlift that ultimately rescued West Berlin’s two million residents from the choice between starvation and communist domination. His 324-day operation was all the more remarkable because it came only three years after the U.S. and its allies had defeated Nazi Germany. At the time, it was still uncertain if Americans would risk their lives and treasure for European security, let alone for the western half of Hitler’s former capital, floating as it did as an indefensible island inside communist territory.
Berliners still spoke with astonishment about Clay’s “bonbon bombers”—the American pilots who had parachuted sweets to the city’s children while breaking the Soviet blockade. Seldom had history seen such a risky and successful humanitarian action on behalf of a vanquished foe. City fathers named one of their broadest and longest boulevards, the Clayallee of the Dahlem district, for the man who had made it happen.
Clay’s determination to keep West Berlin free grew out of a conviction that had only grown over time, relayed to superiors as early as April 1948, that no location on the planet was more important to America’s standing in the world. “We have lost Czechoslovakia. Norway is threatened,” he said. “If we mean…to hold Europe against Communism, we must not budge.” His view was that if America did not grasp the importance of
West Berlin, then communism would run rampant. “I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay….”
There was only one flaw in Clay’s inspiring sense of mission: His motivations for accepting the new job were nobler than Kennedy’s reasons for offering it to him.
For Clay, it was a chance to return to the Cold War’s central battleground at another historic moment when his actions could again be decisive. For Kennedy, dispatching Clay had more to do with domestic politics and public relations.
Clay’s appointment would help neutralize Kennedy’s conservative critics, for the retired general was not just a Berlin hero but also an American and Republican one. He had been instrumental in persuading Eisenhower to run for president and then had helped manage his campaign. Getting Clay under the Kennedy administration tent would also minimize the damage he could do sniping at the president from the outside.
That said, Kennedy’s indecision about just how much power he should give Clay in Berlin underscored his ambivalence about how best to counter Khrushchev. Although Kennedy had made Clay the only American in Berlin with a direct reporting line to the president, he had at the same time failed to give the general formal command over anyone or anything.
Kennedy had even rewritten his original letter of instruction for Clay to water down the broad authority he had initially offered him, to be “fully and completely responsible for all decisions on Berlin.” The president apologized to Clay for the change: “I’m sorry this letter is not the way I wanted it, the way I originally wrote it, but this is the way the State Department feels it will have to be without cutting across all kinds of channels.”
Clay had little choice but to accept the downgraded terms, as he had already left his well-paying job as chief executive of the Continental Can Company. Ever the loyal soldier, he had told the president, “As the situation exists in Berlin it is going to be very difficult no matter how it is done…. If it is easier for you for the letter to be written this way, it is all right with me.” The two men agreed Clay would phone the president on any matter of significance.