Berlin 1961 (51 page)

It was a cool and clear night—perfect for the purpose.

Perhaps Mother Nature was a communist.

GROSSER DÖLLNSEE, EAST GERMANY
10:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST
12, 1961

Ulbricht looked at his watch. “We’re going to have a little meeting,” he said to his guests.

It was precisely 10:00 p.m. and thus time to assemble his garden party’s guests in a single room for the announcement. They were tired, overfed, and ready to go home, having already been with him for more than six hours. More than a few were drunk or at least tipsy. All gathered obediently.

Ulbricht then informed them that the sector border between East and West Berlin would be closed in three hours’ time. In a printed edict, which the ministers there would approve, he would authorize action by East German security forces to place “under proper control the still open border between socialist and capitalist Europe.”

“Alle einverstanden?”
—All agreed?—Ulbricht asked, noting the nodding of his mostly silent guests.

He informed his guests that they, like his domestic staff, would not be able to leave Döllnsee until the operation was well under way to ensure complete security. But, he offered, there was still plenty of food and alcohol for them to enjoy.

No one protested. As Ulbricht had told Soviet Ambassador Pervukhin three days earlier: “We will eat together. I’ll share with them the decision to close the border, and I am entirely convinced that they will approve this measure. But above all else, I will not let them leave until we have completed the operation.

“Sicher ist sicher,”
he had said: Better safe than sorry.

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN
10:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST
12, 1961

Kellett-Long was worried more about his career than about Berlin’s fate.

It was past ten o’clock, and he had no additional facts to back up his Friday story that Berlin was facing a decisive weekend. He returned to the Ostbahnhof to look for any unusual activity and seek out the vendor who regularly provided him with an early edition of
Neues Deutschland
, the Communist Party paper that contained any news of importance.

He hungrily scanned its pages, feeling “shattered” to read only routine stories with “nothing to suggest anything was about to happen.”

Kellett-Long’s London editors, under pressure from subscribers, were pressing him to either file a story to support his earlier report or knock it down. “I can’t just bury my head in the sand,” he thought to himself as he began to compose leads.

“Contrary to expectations…” he typed out.

“Contrary to expectations,
what?
” he asked himself.

“What an amateur I am,” he mumbled to himself.

He crumpled up the paper and tossed it away. In a state of nerves, he smoked one cigarette after another.

RÖNTGENTAL, EAST GERMANY
MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY, AUGUST
13, 1961

Three long, penetrating wails of a siren wrenched Sergeant Rudi Thurow from his slumber. Thurow turned on his light and looked at his watch. It was a minute past midnight. Probably just another drill, he cursed to himself. There had been so many lately. Yet the slender, blond, twenty-three-year-old leader of the 4th Platoon, 1st Brigade, of the East German border police knew his job was to take each one of them seriously.
^*

Thurow had also seen enough military activity the previous afternoon to suspect something more than an exercise was in the works. Soviet T-34 and T-54 tanks had rumbled by all afternoon past his post in Röntgental, forty kilometers north of Berlin, and he had seen several trainloads of East German soldiers rolling into East Berlin.

It had been six years since Thurow had volunteered to join the border guards, attracted by the good pay and privileged access to scarce consumer goods. He had earned decorations of all sorts since then, and had distinguished himself as his brigade’s top sharpshooter.

He dressed quickly, then ran to the adjoining room, where he awakened his men, who cursed in complaint while he abruptly pulled off their blankets. Once assembled in the parade yard, First Lieutenant Witz, the company commander, told his men and dozens of others that on this night, they would undertake measures that had been forced upon them by the enemy.

For too long, said Witz, the government had tolerated the loss of its workforce to the West. He said the flesh merchants in West Berlin, who preyed on the citizens of the GDR, would be put in their place. He spoke of eighty-three espionage and terror centers in West Berlin that would be dealt a crippling blow by his men’s action that night.

Witz, who said he had been briefed only an hour earlier, carefully tore open a large brown envelope marked “Top Secret,” then took out its contents. Thurow and the others impatiently listened while Witz read for five minutes from the document before it came to the point.

In order to prevent the enemy activities of the vengeful and militaristic powers of West Germany and West Berlin, controls will be introduced on the borders of the German Democratic Republic, including the border of the Western sector of Greater Berlin….

Berlin was to be split in two, and Thurow’s men would help draw the dividing line. Thurow heard a fellow sergeant, a loyal communist, whisper a question: “Would the Allies simply stand by and let this happen?”

Or were they at war?

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN
1:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST
13, 1961

Shortly before 1:00 a.m., Adam Kellett-Long watched his East German news agency printer cough out its daily good-night message. He decided “to pack it up” and think about finding new employment in the morning.

Just then, his phone rang and a voice he did not recognize advised him in German not to go to bed that night. At 1:11 a.m., his teleprinter came to life. Kellett-Long read as it spat out a 10,000-word Warsaw Pact decree. The British correspondent was frustrated that the printer would not pump out the copy as quickly as he could read it. It spoke of how “deceived people,” namely the refugees, were being recruited as spies and saboteurs. In response, Warsaw Pact member states were ensuring that “reliable safeguards and effective control be established around the whole territory of West Berlin.” The declaration reassured NATO allies that the Warsaw Pact would not touch access routes to West Berlin.

Kellett-Long raced to his car and drove toward the border to see what was happening. Aside from the occasional couple embracing in a doorway, he saw only a deserted city as he steered down the Schönhauser Allee near his home and then turned on Unter den Linden toward the Brandenburg Gate.

There a policeman waved a red flare to stop his car.

“I’m afraid you can’t go any further,” the policeman said calmly.
“Die Grenze ist geschlossen.”
(The border is closed.)

Kellett-Long then drove up Unter den Linden on his way back to the office to file his report, but he was blocked at Marx-Engels Square, a main parade ground for East German soldiers. Another policeman with another flare stood before its empty expanse, blocking traffic so that a huge convoy of personnel vehicles could pass, carrying uniformed police and soldiers. It seemed to go on forever.

Kellett-Long rushed back to his office to file a “snap” report that would ring news agency machines around the world. It was easy to write: “The East–West border was closed early today….”

He followed that with a first-person account:

Earlier today, I became the first person to drive an East Berlin car through the police cordons since the border controls began shortly after midnight…. The Brandenburg Gate, main crossing point between the two halves of the city, was surrounded by East German police, some armed with submachine guns, and members of the paramilitary “factory fighting guards.”

Kellett-Long then turned on East German radio and heard announcers read one decree after another about new restrictions on travel and how they would be enforced. He filed new reports as quickly as he could type. The British reporter found it curious that East German radio was playing modern, soothing jazz between the endless decrees.

“So that’s all they are doing,” he thought to himself. “They are just reading decrees and playing nice music.”

FRENCH SECTOR, WEST BERLIN
1:50 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST
13, 1961

Twenty minutes after the operation began, West Berlin police sergeant Hans Peters saw the blazing headlights of a half dozen East German army trucks as they rolled down the road he was patrolling. Strelitzer Strasse was a street like 193 others that crossed the previously unmarked boundary between two Berlins.

The trucks belched out soldiers, who scattered up both sides of the street. Each carried long, dark objects that he took to be machine guns. Peters, a Third Reich army veteran who had served on the Eastern Front, pulled his Smith & Wesson revolver from his holster. Yet even as he slipped bullets into the chamber, he knew it was an inadequate defense against such numbers. He sought cover in a doorway, from which he watched a scene that would be repeated throughout the night at dozens of other locations.

Two squads of six soldiers each sprawled and squatted on the sidewalks facing west, pointing their machine guns on tripods in his direction. They had no intention of invading the West and were merely setting up a line to deter a no-show opponent. Behind them, two other squads carried barbed wire. They uncoiled the rolls and hung the strands from wooden sawhorses they had placed across the street. Their cordon was safely within the Soviet zone and well behind the demarcation line.

Though Peters was technically in the French sector, all French soldiers remained in bed. That left only him, a lone West Berlin policeman, to observe a flawless operation. He watched the enemy seal the street so quietly and smoothly that none of the residents of Strelitzer Strasse even rose to turn on a light.

Once the border line was secure, the East German soldiers turned their guns to the East, prepared to contain their own people. Peters alerted his superiors to what he had witnessed.

U.S. MISSION, WEST BERLIN
2:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST
13, 1961

After receiving the first reports of the border closure at around 2:00 a.m., the top U.S. official in Berlin, E. Allan Lightner Jr., was reluctant to awaken his superiors. Washington tended to overreact, and Lightner wanted to get his story straight before reporting in. It was also a summer weekend, and his bosses would be more unhappy than usual about an unnecessary wake-up call.

Senior officials of the U.S, British, and French Allied missions in West Berlin were already burning up phone lines among themselves, piecing together what seemed to be occurring. “There seems to be something going on in East Berlin,” Lightner said with some understatement to diplomatic officer William Richard Smyser, who served in the Eastern affairs section. He wanted them to check it out.

At just past three in the morning in the early light of a northern European dawn, Smyser drove his Mercedes 190SL with his colleague Frank Trinka up to Potsdamer Platz, where East German Vopos (Volkspolizei) and factory militia were unrolling the first strands of barbed wire. When they told the Americans they could not pass, Smyser protested, “We are officials of the American forces. You have no right to stop us.”

It would be the first test of whether the Soviets and their East German clients would prevent Allied right of free passage in Berlin, a potential trigger for a U.S. military response. After an exchange by radio with superiors, the East German police rolled back the barbed wire to let the diplomats pass. They would stop any ordinary East Germans from crossing that night, but the police had clear orders not to impede the movement of Allied officials. Khrushchev’s decision to operate within Kennedy’s guidelines was now operational.

During an hour’s drive around East Berlin, Smyser and Trinka witnessed a city of frenetic police activity and private despair. All along the border, Vopos were unloading concrete posts and barbed wire and blocking all streets leading from East to West. At Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, East Berlin’s main station from the West, armed police were blocking the dimly lit platforms as anguished would-be travelers sat in the cavernous halls on their suitcases and bundles, many of them weeping. As he looked into their faces, Smyser could imagine them thinking, “Oh my God, if we’d only gone twenty-four hours earlier.”

Children were separated from parents, lover from lover, and friend from friend. One of border police sergeant Rudi Thurow’s men had been so ashamed of stopping people from continuing their lives as before that he had vaulted the barbed wire to freedom that morning.

Smyser and Trinka drove back to West Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate, cleared through again after a short delay by an East German policeman who had gained approval from a senior East German Communist Party official who was supervising the crossing.

The diplomats had gathered such a partial picture that the American Mission chose not to file a full report to Washington as the crisis was unfolding. Lightner’s team concluded that they had neither the resources nor the manpower to match news agency reports on what had become a breaking story. Due to State Department bureaucracy, it would take four to six hours anyway to send an official telegram through channels at the U.S. embassy in Bonn from Berlin and then to Washington. The border closure had also disrupted U.S. intelligence efforts to get hold of their usual contacts, thus impeding independent confirmation of what was occurring in East Berlin.

When Lightner debriefed his scouts, he was particularly keen to hear that they had not seen Soviet forces taking any direct part in the operation. On the one hand, that meant the closure was less of a military threat to the U.S., since Soviet troops weren’t massing in Berlin. On the other hand, the East German regime was violating existing four-power agreements that prohibited the presence of its troops in East Berlin at all, let alone their use to occupy the city and seal its border.