Berlin 1961 (47 page)

The two men had been closely tracking the preparatory work of their security services and military forces for most of the previous month, so there was no need to review each detail. Khrushchev said they together would “encircle Berlin with an iron ring…. Our forces must create such a ring, but your troops must control it.” The Soviets were sending an additional 4,000 soldiers to Berlin even as the two men talked. Khrushchev told Ulbricht he was also putting tanks on the border with West Germany, behind East German soldiers’ positions.

The purpose of their meeting that morning was to finalize the timing. Khrushchev said he wanted to put off the signing of any peace treaty with Ulbricht until after the border closure. He was also unwilling to let Ulbricht take any action against access routes or air routes to West Berlin. Ulbricht agreed that although he still wished to sign a war-ending peace treaty with Moscow, that had become secondary to stopping the refugees and saving his country. Ulbricht told the Soviet leader he needed only two weeks to be ready to stop movement between East and West Berlin.

“When would it be best for you to do this?” asked Khrushchev. “Do it when you want. We can do it at any time.”

Because of both the urgency of his refugee problems and the danger that plans could leak, Ulbricht wanted to move quickly. He suggested the night between Saturday, August 12, and Sunday, August 13.

Noting that the thirteenth is considered an unlucky day in the West, Khrushchev joked that “for us and for the whole socialist camp it would be a very lucky day indeed.”

Khrushchev, the builder of the Moscow Metro, wanted to hear more of the logistical details. How would Ulbricht deal with streets, which he had seen on his detailed map, where one side was East Berlin and the other West?

“In those homes which have an exit to West Berlin, we will brick up the exit,” Ulbricht said. “In other places, we will erect barriers of barbed wire. The wire has already been assembled. All of this can be done very quickly.”

Khrushchev refused Ulbricht’s request that he call for an emergency economic conference to prepare necessary support for the East German economy. The Soviet leader feared that merely scheduling such a meeting might tip off the West to their plans—and accelerate the refugee flow even further. Ulbricht would simply have to do his best to prepare.

He also wanted Ulbricht to be certain that all operations remained strictly within his own territory, “and not a millimeter more” into West Berlin. Every signal Kennedy had sent Khrushchev, from the Vienna Summit to his July 25 speech to Fulbright’s television statement, had been that he was on safe ground as long as all Soviet and East German actions were limited to Soviet bloc territory and in no way interrupted Allied rights of access to Berlin. In fact, his most recent conversation with U.S. Ambassador Thompson had convinced him that Kennedy and Adenauer might even welcome the outcome. In a meeting two days earlier, he had told Ulbricht:

When the border is closed, the Americans and West Germans will be happy. Thompson told me that this flight is causing the West Germans a lot of trouble. So when we institute these controls, everyone will be satisfied. And beyond that, they will feel your power.

Without referring to the notion of a Berlin wall by name, Khrushchev asked the Warsaw Pact group to approve a border closure as impermeable as the one that had existed between East and West German territories since 1952. “We propose that the Warsaw Pact states agree, in the interests of the cessation of the subversive activity, to implement control along the GDR borders, including the borders in Berlin, comparable to that existing along the state borders of the Western Powers.”

The three-day Warsaw Pact meeting that followed gave Ulbricht some but not all of what he wanted. His socialist neighbors accepted the border closure without dissent, and they agreed to reposition their troops to back up the Soviet military. What Ulbricht’s allies would not provide, much to Khrushchev’s consternation, was economic insurance. One Communist Party leader after the other—Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, Antonín Novotný of Czechoslovakia, and János Kádár of Hungary—worried about how the West might retaliate economically against the whole bloc and spoke of their limited resources. Gomulka even wanted Ulbricht to consider helping
him
should there be a Western boycott of the entire bloc by redirecting goods that might normally be sold to the West. He worried about how exposed Poland would be to any Berlin blowback because of its large debt and trade with the West.

Novotný warned Ulbricht that he should not count on him for foodstuffs, because of his country’s problems with agricultural production. As Czechoslovakia had a greater share of its trade with the West than any other Warsaw Pact country, he feared his country would suffer most in the aftermath of any Berlin action. Kádár complained that the potential economic impact of an East German border closure had not been discussed among Soviet allies earlier, particularly as his country relied on trade with the West for nearly a third of its economy—and a quarter of that amount was with West Germany.

Khrushchev fumed:

I think we must help the GDR. Let us, comrades, perceive this better, deeper and more keenly…. Now, comrades, we will all help the GDR. I will not say who of you will help most. All must help and must help more. Let us look at it this way: if we do not now turn our attention to the needs of the GDR and we do not make sacrifices, they cannot endure; they do not have enough internal strength.

“What would it mean if the GDR was liquidated?” Khrushchev demanded to know from the leaders sitting before him. Did they want the West German army on their borders? By strengthening East Germany’s position, “we strengthen our position,” he said, frustrated at seeing how little solidarity existed within his bloc. In an alliance where most members felt little threatened by the West but were increasingly dependent upon it economically, Khrushchev’s arguments did not convince them.

When fellow communist leaders asked Khrushchev why he didn’t worry more about American military response, Khrushchev told them the West had reacted far less resolutely than he had feared thus far to his escalating pressures and rhetoric. The U.S., he said, had “proved to be less tough than we assumed” regarding Berlin. Khrushchev said it was true the adversary still “could show himself, but we can already say now that we expected more pressure, but so far the strongest intimidation has been Kennedy’s speech.”

Khrushchev told his allies it was his view that the U.S. was “barely governed,” and that the U.S. Senate reminded him of the medieval Russian principality of Novgorod, where the boyars “shouted, yelled and pulled at each other’s beards; that’s how they decided who was right.”

He even spoke nostalgically of the time when the American secretary of state was John Foster Dulles, who although anticommunist provided “more stability” for the U.S.–Soviet relationship. As for Kennedy, Khrushchev said he “felt for him…he is too much of a lightweight for both Republicans and Democrats.” Khrushchev was confident his weak and indecisive adversary would not respond in any meaningful way.

Ulbricht returned home as the countdown began for the most important day of his life—and that of his country. But first he would have to weather a final skirmish with the East German proletariat.

Ulbricht and Kurt Wismach Lock Horns

OBERSPREE CABLE WORKS, EAST BERLIN
THURSDAY, AUGUST
10, 1961

With less than forty-eight hours to go before launching his operation, Walter Ulbricht nevertheless kept a routine appointment with laborers of the Oberspree Cable Works in the southern part of East Berlin. Some 1,500 laborers gathered in a giant hall, wearing work overalls and wooden shoes that protected them against electrocution and molten metal. Some climbed up the struts of cranes for a better view; others sat atop twelve-foot-high cable rollers.

Reporting that he had just returned from Moscow, Ulbricht told his crowd, “It is imperative that a peace treaty be signed without delay [between East Germany] and our glorious comrade and ally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” In a combative voice, he said, “Nobody can stop socialism…. Not even those who have fallen into the clutches of the slave-traders.” He said the cost to the East German economy of the refugee flight, which he called “flesh trade and kidnappings,” was two and a half billion marks a year. “Every citizen of our State will agree with me that we must put a stop to such conditions.”

Kurt Wismach, who at first appeared to Ulbricht to be just another one of the workers, boiled inside as he listened to what he considered the usual communist double-talk. Imbued with a false sense of strength as he sat far above Ulbricht on a roll of cables, he began to applaud derisively and at length after each of Ulbricht’s statements. It seemed that nothing could stop Wismach’s hands from clapping nor his voice from shouting into the silence of the hall around him.

“Even if I am the only one to say it: Free elections!” he screamed.

Ulbricht looked up at the worker and snapped back. “Now just a moment!” he shouted. “We’re going to clear this up right away!”

Wismach shouted back at the leader whom millions so feared: “Yes, and we’ll see which is the right way!”

Ulbricht shouted up at him and then turned to take in all those seated and standing in the hall around him. “Free elections! What is it you want to elect freely?…The question is put to you by the people!”

By then Wismach spoke with the courage of a man who had gone too far to reverse himself. “Have you the slightest idea what the people really think?” he yelled, seeing that most of his coworkers’ hands were frozen at their sides. No one was coming to his support.

Ulbricht waved his hands and barked back that it had been Germany’s free elections in the 1920s and 1930s that had brought the country Hitler and World War II. “Now I ask you: Do you want to travel along this same road?”

“Nein, nein,”
shouted a vocal minority of party loyalists in the crowd. With each additional rebuttal from Ulbricht and his request for the crowd to support him, this group shouted more encouragement to the communist leader.

Other workers who might have sided with Wismach—likely the majority—remained silent. They realized that to do otherwise would expose them to whatever retribution their vocal fellow laborer would assuredly face.

“The one lonely heckler thinks he shows special courage!” Ulbricht bellowed. “Have the courage to fight against German militarism!”

The party faithful cheered their leader again.

“Whoever supports free elections supports Hitler’s generals!” a red-faced Ulbricht shouted.

The crowd applauded one last time as Ulbricht stormed out.

The next day, party disciplinarians interrogated Wismach on, among other matters, his possible membership in Western flesh-trading and spy agencies. He was required to write a statement retracting his outburst, and he had to accept a pay cut and a demotion that could only be reversed through hard work and “political awareness.”

Wismach left East Berlin as a refugee a few days later with his wife and child. He would be among the last to pass so easily.

14

THE WALL: SETTING THE TRAP

The GDR had to cope with an enemy who was economically very powerful and therefore very appealing to the GDR’s own citizens…. 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.

Premier Khrushchev, explaining in his memoirs his decision to approve the Berlin border closure

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.

Erich Mielke, chief of East German secret police, providing final instructions on August 12, 1961

COMMUNIST PARTY HEADQUARTERS, EAST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST
9, 1961

L
ike a veteran stage producer preparing for the performance of a lifetime, Walter Ulbricht rehearsed every scene with his lieutenants in the last crucial hours before his August 13 curtain call. His drama, code-named “Operation Rose,” would play for one night only. He would have no second chance to get it right.

No detail was too small for Ulbricht’s attention nor that of the man he had deputized to direct the show, Erich Honecker, the Central Committee’s chief for security matters. At age forty-eight, Honecker had two qualities that had recommended him: unquestioned loyalty and unmatched organizational capability.

With his combed-back, graying hair and
Mona Lisa
smile, Honecker had come a long way from his days as the young, handsome communist rabble-rouser who had spent a decade in Hitler’s jails during the 1930s. He knew his operation could catapult him past rivals to become the front-runner for Ulbricht’s eventual succession. It also could save German socialism. Failure would cost him his career and perhaps his country.

Honecker’s final checklist was as long as it was precise.

He needed to know whether his people had purchased sufficient quantities of barbed wire to wrap around West Berlin’s entire ninety-six-mile circumference. To avoid suspicion, Honecker’s team had distributed the barbed-wire orders among a number of innocuous East German purchasers and they, in turn, had negotiated with several different manufacturers in both Great Britain and West Germany.