Berlin 1961 (16 page)

At age eighty-five, Adenauer was an eccentric, shrewd, dryly humorous, and orderly man who had survived all the chaotic stages of Germany’s previous century: the Imperial Reich, Germany’s first unification, the Weimar Republic’s chaos, the Third Reich, and now Germany’s postwar division. He had seen most of his political allies die or fade from the scene, and he worried that Kennedy lacked the historical context, policy experience, and personal character to stand up to the Soviets in the style of his predecessors, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.

Adenauer shared with Ulbricht a distrust of German nature, but his remedy was to lash his country irretrievably to the U.S. and the West through NATO and the European Common Market. As he would explain later, “Our task was to dispel the mistrust harbored against us everywhere in the West. We had to try, step-by-step, to reawaken confidence in Germans. The precondition for this…was a clear, steady, unwavering affirmation of identity with the West” and its economic and political practices.

As the first and still the only freely elected West German chancellor, Adenauer had helped construct from Nazi ruins a vibrant, democratic, free-market state of sixty million people. His objective was to sustain that construct until the West was strong enough to gain unification on its own terms. More immediately, he was seeking a fourth term in September with the rejuvenated purpose of a politician who felt vindicated by history.

Both Ulbricht and Adenauer were simultaneously central actors and needy dependents—both driving and being driven by events—as the ways they spent the first days of 1961 illustrate.

“GROSSES HAUS,” COMMUNIST CENTRAL PARTY HEADQUARTERS,
EAST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY
4, 1961

Standing before a secret emergency session of his ruling Politburo, Walter Ulbricht scratched his goatee unhappily and contradicted his optimistic, public New Year’s message of just three days earlier.

Speaking to his subjects, he had spouted socialist triumph, extolled the success of his farm collectivization, and boasted that he had enriched East Germany economically in the previous year while improving its standing around the world. However, the situation was far too serious to risk employing the same lies on his leadership, who knew better, and whom he needed for his struggle against an opponent whose resources seemed to be expanding with every hour.

“West Berlin is experiencing a growth boom,” Ulbricht complained. “They have increased wages for workers and employees more than we have. They have created more favorable living conditions, and they have to a great degree rebuilt the main parts of the city, while construction in our part continues to lag.” The result, he said, was that West Berlin was “sucking out” the East Berlin workforce, and that more of East Germany’s most talented youth were studying in West Berlin schools and watching Hollywood movies in its theaters.

Ulbricht had never been so clear with his comrades about the enemy’s rising fortunes or their own declining position. “I am only saying this, because we need to deal with the real situation and draw its consequences,” he said, laying out his plans for a year during which he wished to shut off the refugee flow, bolster the East Berlin economy, and protect his East Germany from the spies and propagandists operating from West Berlin.

One speaker after the other rose to support Ulbricht and provide additional reasons for concern. A Magdeburg district party secretary said he had only solved a Christmas tree shortage over the holidays through an emergency harvest. His citizens blamed a shoe and textile shortage on the party’s redirection of insufficient supplies to the more politically sensitive major cities of Karl-Marx-Stadt and Dresden. Politburo member Erich Honecker complained that the West’s attractions were draining East Germany’s sports movement, for which he was responsible, of its best athletes, a serious threat to its Olympic ambitions. Bruno Leuschner, the head of state planning and a concentration camp survivor, said East Germany would only avoid collapse if it got an immediate billion-ruble credit from the Soviets. He reported that he had recently returned from Moscow, where just the technical documents to work out the required scale of Soviet help had filled a twin-engine, Ilyushin Il-14 military cargo plane. East Berlin party boss Paul Verner, a former metalworker, said he could do nothing to stop the continued flight of his city’s most skilled workers.

Ulbricht’s party lieutenants drew a picture of a country heading toward inevitable collapse. As long as so much of the country’s productive capacity was walking out the door as refugees, they complained, they could do little to reverse the trend. Their increasing dependence on the West Berlin economy for suppliers had only made them more vulnerable. Karl Heinrich Rau, the minister in charge of East Germany’s trade with the West, argued that Ulbricht could not accept Khrushchev’s position that they wait until the Soviet leader had his summit with Kennedy before he dealt with the growing problems. They had to act now.

With unusual candor before his party comrades, an exasperated Ulbricht condemned Khrushchev for his “unnecessary tolerance” of the Berlin situation. Ulbricht knew the KGB would get a report on what he told his Politburo, but he nevertheless pulled no punches. The dangers of Khrushchev’s displeasure mattered far less to him than those of his continued inaction. Ulbricht reminded his colleagues that he had been the first to declare openly that all of Berlin should be considered part of East German territory, and that Khrushchev had only later come to agree with him.

Again, Ulbricht said, he would have to take the lead.

The West would not know until years thereafter—through the release of secret East German and Soviet documents—how crucial Ulbricht’s actions during the first days of 1961 would be in shaping everything that followed. That said, his decision to escalate his pressure on Khrushchev, despite the potential political perils for himself, was consistent with a career during which he had repeatedly overcome Soviet and internal opposition to create a state that was more Stalinist than even Stalin had envisioned.

Like his mentor Stalin, Ulbricht was unusually short, standing at just five feet, four inches, and like Stalin he had a physical peculiarity that helped define his misshapen personality. For Stalin, the scars were pockmarks, a limp, and a crippled left arm from childhood disease. Ulbricht’s enduring defect was his distinctive squeaky falsetto voice, born of a diphtheria infection when he was just eighteen. He hammered home his harshest points in a high-pitched, often indecipherable Saxon dialect, leaving listeners waiting for him to calm down and drop an octave or two. His anti-imperialist rants—most often delivered while he wore crumpled suits and shirts with clashing ties—had made him such an object of derision during the 1950s that he had become the butt of jokes among East German citizens (in their bolder or more inebriated moments) and West Berlin cabaret comedians alike. Perhaps in response, Ulbricht had shortened his speeches and begun to wear more neatly pressed double-breasted suits with silver ties. However, those changes had done little to alter his public image.

Like Stalin, Ulbricht was an organizational zealot who remembered people’s names and closely cataloged their loyalties and personal foibles. It was useful data for manipulating friends and destroying enemies. He lacked rhetorical skill and personal warmth, deficits that made it impossible for him to ever gain public popularity, but he compensated with methodical organization skills that would be crucial to running a centrally planned, authoritarian system. Though his East Germany provided a far smaller canvas than that of Stalin’s Soviet empire, he shared the Soviet dictator’s knack for taking and holding power against all odds to achieve improbable outcomes.

Ulbricht was also a man of precision and habit. He started every day with ten minutes of calisthenics and preached to his countrymen in rhyming slogans about the value of regular exercise. Before skating on winter evenings across his private lake with his wife, Lotte, he demanded that the staff smooth the surface so that it did not show a scratch. The fact that Ulbricht,
unlike
Stalin, did not execute his real or perceived enemies did not alter the single-minded purpose with which he had imposed a Bolshevik system on the Soviet-occupied third of a broken postwar Germany. And he had done so against the instructions of Stalin and other Kremlin officials, who had doubted their own particular style of communism would take among Germans, and thus dared not impose it.

Ulbricht had no such qualms. Almost from the hour of Nazi Germany’s collapse, Ulbricht’s vision had shaped the Soviet-occupied zone. At six in the morning on April 30, 1945, just hours before Hitler’s death, a bus picked up the future East German leader and ten other German leftists—known as the
Ulbricht Gruppe
—from the Hotel Lux, the wartime hostelry for exiled communist leaders. Ulbricht’s assignment from Stalin was to help create a provisional government and rebuild the German Communist Party.

Wolfgang Leonhard, the youngest member of the group at age twenty-three, observed that from the moment they landed, “Ulbricht behaved like a dictator” over local communists, whom he considered unfit to rule postwar Germany. Ulbricht had fled Nazi Germany to fight in the Spanish Civil War before retreating to exile in Moscow, and he didn’t hide his disdain for German communists who had remained inside the Third Reich but who had done so little to bring down Hitler—leaving the job to foreigners.

Ulbricht provided a preview of his leadership style when he received a group of a hundred communist district leaders in May 1945 to provide them with their orders. Several of them stood to argue that their most urgent task was to heal the social wounds from widespread incidents of Soviet soldiers raping German women. Some called upon Ulbricht to provide doctors with permission to abort the resulting pregnancies. Others sought a public condemnation of the Red Army’s excesses.

Ulbricht snapped. “People who get so worked up about such things today would have done much better to get worked up when Hitler began the war,” he said. “Any concession to these emotions is for us quite simply out of the question…. I will not allow the debate to be continued. The conference is adjourned.”

As would happen so often in the future, Ulbricht’s would-be opponents remained silent, assuming he had Stalin’s blessing. The truth was that Ulbricht exceeded Stalin’s orders from the beginning. One example came in 1946 when the Soviet dictator asked Ulbricht to fully merge his Communist Party of Germany, or KPD, with the less doctrinaire Social Democratic Party, SPD, to create a single Socialist Unity Party, or SED. Instead, Ulbricht purged enough of the SPD’s key figures to ensure his own leadership and a more dogmatic party than even Stalin had sought.

As late as April 1952, Stalin had told Ulbricht, “Although two states are being currently created in Germany, you should not shout about socialism at this point.” Stalin preferred a unified Germany with all its national resources, one that would exist outside America’s military embrace, rather than Ulbricht’s rump state inside the Soviet bloc. Ulbricht, however, had his own plans, and he campaigned to create a distinct and Stalinist East Germany through the nationalization of 80 percent of the industry and the exclusion from higher education of the children of so-called bourgeois parents.

By July 1952, Stalin had embraced Ulbricht’s plan for a draconian period of forced collectivization and greater social repression. Ulbricht’s convictions only grew deeper after Stalin’s death, when he survived at least two efforts by liberalizing party comrades to unseat him. Both failed after Soviet military interventions put down first the East German and then the Hungarian uprisings of 1953 and 1956—rebellions that had been inspired by reforms that Ulbricht had opposed.

Just as Ulbricht had been more determined than Stalin to create a Stalinist East Germany, he was also more determined than Khrushchev to protect his creation. Speaking to his Politburo on January 4, 1961, he bluntly blamed East Germany’s own shortcomings for 60 percent of all refugee departures. He declared that the party had to address housing shortages, low pay, and inadequate pensions, and that it must reduce the workweek from six to five days by 1962. He complained that 75 percent of those fleeing their country were under twenty-five years old, evidence that East German schools were not properly preparing young people.

The most important action of the Politburo’s emergency session was its approval of Ulbricht’s plan to create a highest-level working group whose purpose would be to design plans to “fundamentally stop” the refugee bleed. Ulbricht put his three most loyal, reliable, and resourceful lieutenants on the job: Minister for State Security Erich Honecker, Interior Minister Karl Maron, and Erich Mielke, the head of his vast secret police operation.

Having circled the communist wagons at home, he was ready to turn his attention to Khrushchev.

FEDERAL CHANCELLERY, BONN
THURSDAY, JANUARY
5, 1961

By tradition, Catholic and Protestant orphans arrived first to congratulate Konrad Adenauer on his eighty-fifth birthday. Shortly after ten in the morning, two boys dressed as dwarfs and a girl clad as Snow White entered the cabinet hall, where West Germany’s first and only chancellor was receiving well-wishers. One dwarf wore a red cap, blue cape, and red pants, and the other was dressed in a blue cap, red cape, and blue pants. Both shrank behind their identical white beards as the nuns pushed them forward to greet one of German history’s great men, who sniffled badly with a lingering cold.

The chancellor’s friends were convinced that Adenauer’s inconsolable concerns about Kennedy’s victory had worsened his illness, contracted before the election, from a cold to bronchitis and then to pneumonia. He was only now recovering. Though the chancellor had publicly praised Kennedy with false effusiveness, he feared privately that Americans had elected a man of dangerously flawed character and insufficient backbone. His intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, had provided Adenauer with reports of Kennedy’s sexual infidelities, a weakness the communists would know how to exploit. Yet Kennedy’s undisciplined personal behavior was just one of many reasons Adenauer concluded that Kennedy, forty-two years his junior, was “a cross between a junior naval person and a Roman Catholic Boy Scout,” both undisciplined and naive at the same time.