EAST GERMANY: Parting Words

“Friendship, friendship, friendship!” chanted the 130,000 East Germans on signal from their Communist cheerleaders, “The friendship of our two peoples is one of the great achievements of our time,” cried Nikita Khrushchev, and his voice boomed through the loudspeakers to the factory workers, government employees and militiamen herded in ranks into East

Berlin’s huge Marx-Engels Platz for Khrushchev’s farewell appearance.

Nikita Khrushchev had had a stolid and passive reception everywhere in East Germany, and his ire began to come up. After calling Hitler “the hangman of the international workers’ movement,” Khrushchev addressed himself directly to Konrad Adenauer, as if the West German Chancellor were in his audience. Why, he demanded, should Adenauer’s government have now revived, at trade talks in Moscow, the question of repatriating the 60,000 to 90,000 Germans left behind in Russia in World War II? Said Khrushchev: “We have long since come to agreement on repatriation of prisoners of war, and this has been carried out. I lost a son in the war, and so did Comrade Mikoyan. Many thousands of Russian soldiers are missing and presumed dead. You too can consider your alleged Germans dead.”

There was not a sound from the vast German crowd; even the cheerleaders were silent. At that moment only the flapping Red banners said anything about German-Soviet friendship.