The Cold War (4 page)

The evening of January 20, 1946, was clear and cold in Salzburg. Freshly fallen snow crunched beneath the tread of the few passersby in that defeated and occupied city. CIC got a phone call from Milovanovich asking for “backup.” He was in Kauder's apartment, and he didn't like what he saw from the window. Kauder's house, located in a blind alley, was filled with American MPs, he said. This was news to CIC. We rounded up people and sent two jeeps, carrying four CIC agents and four SSU personnel, to investigate. The vehicles arrived at Kauder's place at ten-thirty P
.
M.

Meanwhile, Milovanovich noted an MP, with pistol and 505 mp on his helmet liner, climbing the stairs to Kauder's flat. Despite the lack of bullets in his weapon, Milovanovich decided to brazen it out.

“Stop!” he shouted from the top of the stairs. The MP did not stop.

“Halt!”
cried Milovanovich. The MP did not halt.

Finally, Milovanovich decided to use Russian.
“Stoi!”
he shouted. This time the “MP”
stoi
-ed, but he also pulled out his .45-caliber pistol, the one the Viennese called “pocket flak” because of its ammo size. Clearly unused to the weapon, he fired it wildly. At that moment, the two jeeps bearing the CIC and SSU men arrived. Firing, mostly into the air, became general. An “MP” tried to slug a CIC man with his pistol but was disarmed. In a matter of moments, four of the “MPs” were surrounded by armed CIC and SSU men, who marched them off to imprisonment. In front of Kauder's house sat a huge automobile, a Nazi Horch, with double rear tires four feet in diameter. Inside the Horch lay a preferred instrument of Soviet kidnapping: a Persian rug in which a captive could be wrapped so tightly that he could barely breathe, much less cry out.

At CIC headquarters, the prisoners were brought before me. Their “MP” uniforms revealed, under the U.S. jackets, the complete uniform of the Soviet army. In Salzburg, a Soviet repatriation mission with quasi-diplomatic status had been operating since the war's end. Although the Americans knew the mission
was mostly NKVD (Soviet secret police), the Soviets spent most of their free time at the American PX buying food and giving no cause for worry. The four prisoners were from this mission.

How did the Soviets get ahold of American MP uniforms? An alcoholic American warrant officer had been virtually living at the Soviet mission, where he was fed vodka nonstop. Since he was the logistics officer for the MP battalion in Salzburg, getting uniforms from him was not difficult.

The Soviet group stood impassively in a circle around me. I informed the leader of the prisoners, Major Passichnik, that he and his little team would spend the night at the Landesgericht jail, a stopping point for hundreds of German SS and Gestapo officials en route to the U.S. internment camp. The major could not believe his ears.

“You are going to put us in a
German
cell?” he thundered. “Why don't you put us in an American CIC prison?”

Because, I told him, the Americans don't have their own prison or cells. This inability to match the NKVD cell for cell or prison for prison so shocked this gentleman that he and his fellow prisoners went meekly across the square to incarceration.

We still had not informed CIC's Vienna headquarters of the situation and the arrests; nor could we do so without also informing the Soviet high command: The CIC's communications landlines ran through the Soviet zone of Lower Austria to Vienna. The report on the prisoners would have to go to Vienna by air.

Salzburg had an airport. But it was a tiny one, commanded by a U.S. Air Force first lieutenant named Frost. We approached the lieutenant, who initially and promptly turned down the request to fly to Vienna as too dangerous. He said he would fly to the American airfield at Tülln, twelve miles outside Vienna. This was quite unsatisfactory, because it meant that any messenger could be intercepted by the Soviets outside Vienna. (The remaining officers at the Soviet mission in Salzburg had already advised NKVD headquarters near Vienna to intercept any reports on the prisoners.) We virtually promised Lieutenant Frost a medal for delivering top-secret info and convinced him to fly to Vienna and land at dawn on a street in an American ward. Frost had but one airworthy plane, a Piper Cub, which had been used as an artillery-spotting craft.

Fortunately, Frost hadn't arrived until after the war and was desperate to win
any sort of a decoration. Once he agreed, we wrote up the report on the Soviet repatriation mission, placed it inside double envelopes (top-secret style), and delivered it to the lieutenant, who immediately took off in his Piper Cub.

Frost, recognizing the nonfighting character of his aircraft, headed north until he reached the Danube River and then flew “on the deck,” skimming the Danube's murky waters, often scarcely fifty feet above the river. In Soviet-con-trolled Lower Austria, two MiGs rose to demand why he was flying over Sovietcontrolled territory, but they did not dare dive down on the Piper Cub lest they find themselves in the Danube. So Frost flew on, landing the Cub at daybreak in an American-controlled ward on a street that had been cleared of traffic. He came to a stop a few feet from a wall. Frost hopped out, jumped into a waiting CIC jeep, and was conveyed to General Mark W. Clark, former military chief on the Italian front and now American high commissioner for Austria. Clark read the CIC report intently.

For three days, the Soviets in Vienna demanded the release of the prisoners in Salzburg, and for three days, Clark stalled, blasting his Soviet opposite number, Field Marshal Konyev, every time the latter called or came to a four-power meeting.

Back in Salzburg, Major Passichnik and the other three prisoners were raising hell, promising their Austrian jailer all sorts of dire consequences. The jailer was both happy to have the Soviets in his grasp and appalled by the threats he was hearing, and daily he sent a list of them to the Americans.

Finally, having toyed with the Soviet field marshal enough, Clark told me by telephone to let the prisoners go. I had the Soviets showered and shaved and brought before me in freshly pressed uniforms. In English and German, I dressed them down for breaking their diplomatic status and said I was returning them to the Soviet high command.

It was a quiet three-car convoy that set out for the “border” between the Soviet and the American zones with the Russians on board. The country road led north from Salzburg to Linz and thence east to the railroad bridge that crossed the Enns River into Lower Austria. Upon reaching the Enns, I explained to the Soviets that they must walk across the railroad bridge until they saw fellow Russians. We watched intently with binoculars what transpired. We noted that the NKVD had arrived with a Black Maria—a truck with a canvas top. As each of the Soviets, led by Passichnik, clambered into the truck, he was “aided” by a rifle butt to his posterior; 1946 was still the era of Stalin, and the penalty for failure was not a pleasant one.

After a brief stay in an interrogation center in Germany, Kauder was back in Vienna. The Americans never established which side he had been working for, but we felt he was a Soviet double agent who had purposely fed the Germans bad information about Kursk. Kauder was given his freedom by SSU and remained in Austria. American intelligence lost track of him in 1950.

As for Lieutenant Frost, he got a Bronze Star for his low-level flight in the Piper Cub. He had taken part in a war, after all—the Cold War.

DAVID CLAY LARGE

Vienna and Berlin were the only cities on the historical fault line of the Iron Curtain where the two sides directly confronted each other. While Vienna's potential for trouble diminished with time, Berlin's only seemed to grow. The divided city was 110 miles within the Soviet zone of occupation—and later, East Germany (or the German Democratic Republic, as it was formally called). Berlin became the most dangerous flash point of the Cold War. Its importance, early on, was strategic. If the Soviets could force their former allies to evacuate Berlin, demoralization and a sense of abandonment by the U.S. might spread over Western Europe. They might have achieved a principal goal: a unified, demilitarized, and politically nonaligned Germany—which, no doubt, would eventually drop into the Communist camp. Who could tell which countries might follow? It was the domino argument—or the “bandwagon effect,” as it was called then—but it made sense, perhaps more than it would in Asia in the 1960s. Later, as the two sides hardened their positions and allowed them to petrify, the importance of Berlin became largely symbolic, especially with the building of the Wall in 1961. But that is getting ahead of our story.

Another event played just as decisive a part in turning Berlin into a symbol. That was the Soviet blockade of the Western-held sectors of the city, severing all road, rail, and river access. The Soviets made the introduction of the Western deutsche mark in June 1948 as their excuse, but the underlying purpose was to prevent the establishment of a separate West German state. In this chess game, the response of Great Britain and the United States was to institute an airlift, utilizing the three twenty-mile-wide air corridors the Soviets had allowed them in 1945. So began
“The Great Rescue,” as David Clay Large aptly calls it. The airlift has to be counted one of the genuine triumphs in the history of military logistics: By the time the Soviets backed down in May 1949, Western Allies had achieved a practically bloodless strategic victory. In just four years, they had transformed Berlin from Hitler's capital to the “outpost of freedom,” the symbolic bastion of the so-called free world.

DAVID CLAY LARGE is a professor of history at Montana State University and an authority on modern German history. Among his books are
Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich; Berlin;
and, most recently,
And the World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust
. Large is working on a book about the 1936 Olympic games. He divides his time between Bozeman, Montana, and San Francisco.

I
N 1958, SOVIET PREMIER
Nikita Khrushchev observed that Berlin was the “testicles of the West,” which he had only to “squeeze” to make his adversaries scream. Moscow's most painful pressure on this tender part occurred a decade earlier, in 1948–49, when the Soviets closed off all road, rail, and river traffic between the Western sectors of Berlin and the Allied zones of occupation in western Germany. This most audacious of modern blockades produced an even more ambitious response from the Western Allies: the fabled Berlin Airlift, which managed to break the Russian stranglehold after eleven months. Ever since, the Big Lift has been justifiably celebrated as a magnificent example of fortitude, technical skill, and organizational prowess. Yet the enterprise was, from the outset, a highly risky expedient that provided some of the most dangerous moments in the early Cold War.

Berlin had been a bone of contention between Soviet Russia and the Western Powers even before the Cold War began. The Americans and British had allowed the Red Army to overrun the Nazi capital in May 1945 on the understanding that they would gain immediate access to the city, which was to be governed jointly by the Four Powers (Britain having agreed to give France part of its sector of occupation in exchange for some of the American sector). But once ensconced in Berlin, the Soviets obstructed Western entry for about eight weeks. During their time of exclusive control, they began stripping the region of industrial machinery and shipping it back to Russia. By the time their Western “partners” arrived, in early July, the Soviet forces had taken away almost 70 percent of Berlin's heavy industry.

At the same time, the Russians sought to establish the basis for political control over the entire city by employing handpicked German Communists to staff municipal offices. Walter Ulbricht, who had been living in exile in Moscow
(and avoiding Stalin's purges by prodigies of toadying), was put in charge of a “Communist Action Group” that placed reliable functionaries in key administrative posts. Paul Markgraf, a Stalinist thug, became chief of police, while Arthur Pieck, son of German Communist Party chairman Wilhelm Pieck, took over the department of personnel. Lenin once said that whoever controls Berlin controls Germany, and whoever controls Germany controls Europe. Lenin's successors had obviously taken this wisdom to heart.

Despite early friction with the Soviets, the Western Powers hoped for harmonious Four-Power administration of Berlin and Germany in the immediate postwar era. To avoid provoking the Russians, they did not press for a written agreement defining land access across the Soviet zone to their sectors in Berlin. Perhaps they took it for granted that the surface routes would not be impeded. At any rate, only access by aircraft was guaranteed through a specific arrangement in 1945, which established three air corridors into the city, each twenty miles wide. “The Soviets were very legalistic in that respect when it suited them, and they caught us,” observed an American diplomat with unimpeachable hindsight.

Legalism, however, was not very evident in the administration of Berlin and Germany in the first years after the war. The Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 called for treating Germany as a single economic unit, but each military government evolved policies unique to its occupation zone, and each applied its own interpretation of the “Four-D” principles: de-Nazification, demilitarization, decartelization, and democratization. Not surprisingly, the greatest discrepancies were between the three Western zones and the Soviet zone. The sharply diverging approaches meant that meetings of the Allied Control Council (responsible for all of Germany) and the Allied Kommandatura (responsible for Berlin) often degenerated into verbal mud fights, with the Soviets accusing the Western Powers of coddling former Nazis and fomenting remilitarization, while the Western Allies charged Moscow with looting Germany in order to keep it permanently unstable and ripe for Communist domination.

The divisions among the occupation powers were especially intense in the former Nazi capital, which was rapidly becoming known as the “Capital of the Cold War.” In preparation for municipal elections to be held in October 1946, German Communists, backed by the Soviets, forced a merger of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party into the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The fusion was supposed to apply citywide, but Social Democrats in the Western zones decisively rejected this shotgun marriage, preferring to
remain single and free of control from Moscow. In the October elections, the SPD won 48.7 percent of the municipal vote; the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) 22.2 percent; and the SED 19.8 percent. Given their first chance at free elections in over thirteen years, the Berliners had overwhelmingly rejected the version of “democracy” sponsored by the SED.