World: BERLIN: Tne Bone in Russia’s Throat

AS Nikita Khrushchev last week rumbled his new threats against the Western presence in Berlin, the reasons for his ire were shuffling through the long lines at West Berlin’s big, drab Marienfelde clearing center for refugees. They were the Grenzgänger, the border-hopping escapees from East Germany who flee to the West by the hundreds each week, making a mockery of Communist claims of providing a better life, and sapping the strength of their limping, labor-short country. Since 1945, some 4,000,000 East Germans—almost one-fourth of East Germany’s entire present population—have fled to the West. Some have braved the guards, watchdogs and barbed wire to slip directly across the long, 400-mile zonal frontier that separates the two Germanys. But most have chosen the safer route through occupied Berlin, where, by Big Four agreement, anyone can ride the subway or elevated train to the freedom of West Berlin, where airliners are waiting to whisk them to safety in West Germany itself.

Down Tools. Through this leak in the Iron Curtain, the very lifeblood of East Germany dribbles out at a steady, undiminished rate. Almost 75% of the escapees are under 45—the very age group that Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht needs most to boost production and fulfill East Germany’s role as one of the U.S.S.R.’s biggest trade partners and source of much of the Communist bloc’s heavy machinery.

Since 1954, more than 16,000 trained engineers have flown the coop. At one hydraulic-equipment plant in Saxony, 17 top engineers departed en masse with all the blueprints. East German universities have lost 912 professors and instructors; 16,500 primary and secondary school teachers have abandoned their blackboards. In six years, 5,107 doctors, dentists and veterinarians left the country. Among last week’s crop of refugees were an airport director, the technical director of the big nationalized steel plant at Thale, and the chief doctor of Leipzig University’s surgical clinic (his predecessor fled to the West seven months ago).

Adding insult to injury, two-thirds of all the refugees from what Ulbricht fondly calls “the first worker and peasant state in German history” have been workers and peasants, and no fewer than 3,933 card-carrying members of Communist Ulbricht’s elite Socialist Unity Party joined the departing hordes in 1960 alone.

Carrot & Stick. “We must wage a decisive battle against the migration,” cried Ulbricht a few weeks ago, admitting that this “organized slave trade” with other Western activities in West Berlin, costs East Germany “one billion marks annually.” What bothers Ulbricht is satellite East Germany’s lagging rate of industrial expansion; it was largely shortage of labor that forced Ulbricht to scrap East Germany’s aircraft industry a few months ago. In desperation, the party is urging housewives to go into the factories, and schoolchildren often “donate” a day of work in the fields.

Pudgy Walter Ulbricht has tried both the carrot (higher wages) and the stick (police purges) in his efforts to keep his citizens at home. In fact, every time the Communists try to impose an unpopular policy, the refugee rate among the group most affected increases and more valuable manpower is lost. Thus Berlin keeps the Communists from being as ruthless as they would like. So far this year, the refugee exodus rate is even higher than last year.

Khrushchev growled to President Kennedy in Vienna last week that Berlin was a bone in his throat, and it must be removed. Just as grimly, the President of the U.S. replied that the West is in Berlin legally, not by Russia’s sufferance, and intends to stay there.

If Berlin is a painfully exposed position for the West, it is an almost intolerable embarrassment for Khrushchev. For all the world to see, its refugees are vivid proof that, given a choice, men still choose freedom.