Berlin: The Wall

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The scream of sirens and the clank ot steel on cobblestones echoed down the mean, dark streets. Frightened East Berliners peeked from behind their curtains to see military convoys stretching for blocks. First came the motorcycle outriders, then jeeps, trucks and buses crammed with grim, steel-helmeted East German troops. Rattling in their wake were the tanks — squat Russian-built T-34s and T-54s. At each major intersection, a platoon peeled off and ground to a halt, guns at the ready. The rest headed on for the sector border, the 25-mile frontier that cuts through the heart of Berlin like a jagged piece of glass. As the troops arrived at scores of border points, cargo trucks were already unloading rolls of barbed wire, concrete posts, wooden horses, stone blocks, picks and shovels. When dawn came four hours later, a wall divided East Berlin from West for the first time in eight years.

The wall was illegal, immoral and strangely revealing—illegal because it violated the Communists’ solemn contracts to permit free movement throughout the city; immoral because it virtually jailed millions of innocent people; revealing because it advertised to all the world the failure of East Germany’s Communist system, and the abject misery of a people who could only be kept within its borders by bullets, bayonets and barricades.

Just in Time. For Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s goat-bearded, Communist boss, the wall was utterly necessary to preserve the very life of his dismal satrapy. For seldom had history witnessed so great an exodus as had been flowing Westward in great clotted spurts. “You are sharing in the Great Socialist Experiment,” Ulbricht cried to his people in 1949, as he cut their food ration and trimmed away their liberties. Far from sharing Ulbricht’s enthusiasm, almost 3,500,000 East Germans—no less than 20% of the post-World War II population—fled to the West in the eleven years that followed. In the first eleven days of August 1961 alone, 16,500 sought haven in West Berlin; the refugees included an East German Supreme Court judge, East German policemen, soldiers, physicians, lawyers, engineers, farmers, workers, merchants—the lifeblood of any country.

Even as the 80,000 East German Volkspolizei (People’s Police) and Volksarmee (People’s Army) troops were erecting their barricades across most of the 80 border-transit points last week, desperate clusters of East Berliners were still trying to break out to freedom. Only a few were successful. One elderly man and wife crawled on hands and knees across a cemetery near the boundary as “Vopos” strung barbed wire only 20 yds. away. A young married couple swam the Teltow Canal with their four-year-old child perched on his father’s shoulders. A couple of East Germans returning from a late movie, saw the tanks, sprinted across to the American sector just in time.

Rooms with a View. But most were frustrated by Ulbricht’s meticulous Communist planning. Even as the open street crossings were being barricaded, other squads raced to lock the gates of the S-bahn (elevated) and of the ten major U-bahn (subway) stations that serviced trains traveling into West Berlin. Guards were posted in the pitch-dark U-bahn tunnels to halt the more imaginative sneakers. After a helmeted Vopo guard at the new barrier leaped across the barbed wire and escaped to the West, East German officers began keeping their enlisted men several yards from the wire to prevent more defections. Toughest task of all was sealing the frontier where the line slices down the center of residential streets and even cuts through the middle of houses. Solution: Tommy gunners sauntering along the middle of the streets, locked doors and bricked-in windows for any home that had a room with the wrong view.

Berlin—both East and West—responded to the new Communist crisis with electric excitement and ill-subdued resentment. The barricades meant that thousands of families, split between the halves of the city, could not see their relatives. Fifty thousand East Berliners who regularly commuted to West Berlin were now cut off from their jobs by official decree. At the city’s two biggest squares where East once met West, bustling Potsdamer Platz and the soaring sandstone Brandenburg Gate, thousands of East and West Berliners gathered to gape and to jeer at the scowling Communist troops gripping submachine guns and standing shoulder to shoulder beside a solid phalanx of armored cars. When the crowd moved too close, there was the jab of a Communist bayonet or a sudden blast from the powerful Wasserkanonen (water cannons), the wheeled squirters of the East Berlin riot squad that can topple a man at 50 yds.

The Bobbing Beard. The danger was that the tense crowds on both sides of the barriers might merge and touch off the East German revolt that everyone feared. Already Moscow’s famed Marshal Ivan Konev had moved two divisions of Russian troops into Berlin’s outskirts, ready for the kind of action that the Soviets had employed to put down the abortive 1953 East German revolt. But the West Berliners were not intimidated. “Berlin bleibt frei, Berlin bleibt frei” (Berlin will remain free), chanted a crowd of 30,000 gathered a stone’s throw from the Vopos on the Western side of the Brandenburg Gate. Near by, an East German cop who got too close to a West Berlin throng was grabbed, hauled over the line and savagely beaten. Realizing that things were nearing flash point, West Berlin police slowly forced their own people a half-mile away from the sector border. As they backed off. the West Berliners, in one final retort before they were out of earshot, cried “Hang Ulbricht! Hang Ulbricht!”

The man the mob wanted to lynch was nowhere within noose’s range. In the first hours of crisis, paunchy Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht stayed out of sight in his office, blocks away in the ugly little square headquarters of his Socialist Unity Party. He was constantly on the telephone, receiving reports, issuing crisp commands. As he talked, the little white-streaked beard bobbed incessantly below flaring nostrils. But there was no animation in the cold clear eyes behind the rimless bifocals. Just back from Moscow, where he had sought and finally won Nikita Khrushchev’s personal permission to close the Berlin escape route, Ulbricht himself had planned much of the border crackdown. But not until two days later did he get out to visit the troops. Then, protected by a swarm of security police, he appeared at Potsdamer Platz in a light grey suit and cream-colored straw hat to pat a Vopo on the back, gaze briefly at the sullen West Berliners through the barbed wire. Seconds later he was off again in his big black Zil limousine. No rubbernecking West Berliner recognized him. “Thank God,” sighed a West Berlin cop. “I doubt that we could have stopped them. There were too many.”

“Pfui, Pfui.” Hate followed Ulbricht through his own East Berlin streets; as the Zil headed next toward the Brandenburg Gate, 50 East Berliners on the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse let loose with Berlin’s Bronx cheer: “Pfui! Pfui!” The police entourage stopped long enough to chase the crowd and arrest one man. Walter Ulbricht rolled on, unmindful of the curses of his own people.

The crowd could jeer, but Ulbricht had the guns. For 16 years he had handled his detractors with little difficulty, and now, with 20 Soviet divisions to back him up, he could handle them again. He was proudly boasting that he could even handle the Western imperialists. “Terrific the way everything clocked,” gloated Ulbricht’s party paper Neues Deutschland. “Here is proof that in Germany a strong state has arisen … see how our worker and peasant power asserts its authority!”

The Communists noted with glee the West’s initial wait-and-see reaction. Moscow’s massive bluff seemed to have worked wonders. For weeks Khrushchev had been waving his bombs around, threatening the Greeks and Italians with nuclear destruction, frightening the British with talk of rockets. And even as the Berlin border seal-off was in progress, the Red army invited Western military attaches in Moscow to a show of Soviet infantry alleged to be armed with nuclear-tipped tactical rockets—a strong hint that this was precisely the way Marshal Konev’s divisions around Berlin were equipped for a scrap.

Shooting Grouse. For three days there was neither retaliation nor official word from Washington, London or Paris as the Vopos worked feverishly to finish their wall. Critics of Western policy were quick to point out that several avenues of action were actually open. In Remagen, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, campaigning hard for next month’s West German elections, stole a march on his opponent, West Berlin’s Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt, with the suggestion that West Germany’s lucrative trade pact with East Germany might be terminated to penalize Ulbricht. Another possibility: a ban against East Germans traveling anywhere in the free world. But the Big Three seemed determined to take no hasty action that might aggravate an already dangerously tense situation. Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan calmly went grouse shooting; De Gaulle looked the other way.* Finally, a note from Berlin’s allied commanders rapped Khrushchev’s knuckles, threatened no reprisals at all. Furious West Berliners massed in front of Willy Brandt’s town hall to hear the mayor demand “not merely words but political action” from President John F. Kennedy. As the crowd roared its assent and waved placards (“Kennedy to Berlin,” “You can’t stop tanks with paper”), Brandt went on to suggest that Berlin was becoming a “new Munich.”

Saving Ammunition. Mayor Brandt might be forgiven his electioneering zeal, his on-the-spot emotions, but for a German of any political persuasion to remind the British of Munich was a bitter gibe. What mattered to the U.S. and Britain and France were the vital access routes that cross the 110-mile reach of East Germany and enter West Berlin; what also mattered was the welfare of West Berlin itself. Even Willy Brandt took heart when President Kennedy showed his colors by sending Vice President Lyndon Johnson as a personal emissary to Berlin, and a battle group of 1,500 U.S. soldiers raced down the Autobahn, reasserting the allied right of access to the beleaguered city.

The world waited to see how far Nikita Khrushchev might press the rest of his threats—to sign a peace treaty with Ulbricht’s barbed-wire corral, to declare West Berlin a free city. The Russian also had other complaints: the West’s use of the city as a propaganda and espionage center. But the biggest bone in Nikita’s throat had been the refugee flow that threatened to destroy his East German satellite, machine shop for the whole Red bloc and the vital buffer between the West and Red Poland. Now the exodus was stopped.

The Carpenter. Walter Ulbricht. 68, the man who stopped the refugees, had held the buffer together ever since 1945. No other satellite leader can make so lengthy a claim to power. Cold, tough Ulbricht has been able to survive not only Moscow’s postwar purges, but Communism’s intraparty conflicts and democracy’s popular revolts.

A tailor’s son, Ernst Paul Walter Ulbricht learned early the art of political survival. He was already a member of a workers’ youth organization when he began his career in Leipzig as a cabinetmaker’s apprentice at the age of 17 (.”I am a carpenter by trade,” he says proudly today ). Only a hundred miles away was Berlin, where Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were working to merge their Spartakusbund with the splinter Socialists to form the German Communist Party. In 1920, two years after Rosa and Karl were killed by the authorities for provoking street fights, the merger was accomplished—and Walter Ulbricht was at the meeting. His presence ensured him an exalted role in Communist councils for years to come, and an early job with the K.P.D.—the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands.

From the start, Ulbricht was a brassy enemy of the intellectuals who had captured control of the party in the early 19205. Ulbricht’s pal was a Russian courier who had direct contact with Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in Moscow. Soon Pravda was sniping at the “nonproletarian enemies of the working class in the German party,” and soon Ulbricht’s enemies were purged. It was time for a major party overhaul; tough, conscientious Walter Ulbricht got the job. Comrade Ulbricht took on the name Genosse Zelle (Comrade Cell), began atomizing the easygoing Communist cliques into tight little cells of neighborhood half-dozens who were strangers to one another.

By 1928, Ulbricht was a Red big shot, marked for bigger things. Now he was wearing a necktie and having Berlin’s best tailors make his suits; he sat in the Reichstag itself as a Communist Deputy. He was grandly aware of his station. Once, when Ernst Thalmann, the new party leader boarded a train at a Berlin railway station and took his seat in a third-class railway coach, Ulbricht stiffly declined to join his colleague, choosing instead a seat in the plush first-class section. He was entitled to such preference as a member of the Reichstag.

For all his airs, when things really got tough in Nazi Germany, Ulbricht was one of the first to run out. As a Communist agent he took refuge in Prague, then Paris. In between, there were the months in civil war-torn Spain when, from his base at Albacete, he took on the OGPU-assigned task of purging the West European “Trotskyites,” i.e.. anti-Stalinists. What made Walter Ulbricht famous in Spain was his ingenious torture chamber, a cell of granite blocks too small for a man to stand or sit.

The Weathervane. Few in Germany will forget Ulbricht’s traitorous attacks on his own fellow Communists, many of them colleagues of long standing. Even today, contemporaries are sure that he tipped off the Nazis who arrested Thalmann and later executed him. In 1938 Ulbricht moved to Moscow to serve Stalin more closely. Of the many other German Communists who sought refuge in Russia, some 3,000 were killed or sent to labor camps by Moscow’s harsh dictum. Ulbricht had not so much as raised a finger to protect them.

Among his relentless, cold-blooded fellow plotters. Walter Ulbricht stood out as the iciest of them all, for he had no trace of sentiment or warmth. He was generally despised even by his colleagues; “Tovarish Woodenhead,” they sneered behind his back because of his mimicry of Moscow. The great female stalwart of German Communism, Klara Zetkin, once remarked: “May a benevolent fate prevent this man from ever rising to the top of the Communist Party. I cannot stand him. Look into his eyes and you will see how sly and false he is.”

But as long as he had Stalin’s blessing, Ulbricht neither needed nor wanted close friends. In Moscow’s Hotel Lux he enjoyed not only the companionship of his Berlin-born girl friend, Lotte Kuhn,-but also the comfortable knowledge that each purged comrade meant more room for himself as he scrambled toward the top job in Communism’s German party. No one cherished leadership more avidly, nor curried favor with the Kremlin more expectantly. When the Hitler-Stalin treaty was signed, Ulbricht dutifully put his pen to work in the pact’s support. “Whoever intrigues against the friendship of the German and Soviet people is an enemy of the German people,” he wrote in 1940. “Under no circumstances can a breach of the pact be tolerated.”

On to Wall Street. Such sterling services produced their due reward. When the Germans finally attacked their “ally.” Stalin named Ulbricht a top member of the National Committee for Free Germany, which organized anti-Hitler propaganda campaigns in German prisoner-of-war camps, broadcast Moscow’s message by loudspeaker to the Nazi divisions around Stalingrad. The National Committee was no great success in winning over the enemy. But it did serve as a readymade nucleus for Communist administration when the time came to move into postwar Germany. When Hitler’s armies collapsed, one man was the logical choice to carry the Red flag into shattered Berlin: on May 2, 1945, Walter Ulbricht. flown from Moscow for the honor, drove into the Nazis’ burning capital in a convoy of limousines with ten tough, trustworthy German Communist aides.

Headquarters of Communism’s first postwar political commissariat in Berlin was on the second floor of a dismal concrete building on a thoroughfare named, of all things, Wallstrasse—Wall Street. From these few dingy rooms, the faithful Ulbricht, now sporting a wispy mustache and a pointed little Lenin beard, sent his agents fanning out to grab control—first of the Berlin city administration, then of every town and city in the Soviet zone.

Cops and Robbers. Ulbricht’s formidable stamina kept his colleagues on an 18-hour workday, and his astonishing memory enabled him to pull the names and addresses of hundreds of loyal Communists out of an ever ready mental file. “When we set up the East Zone’s first Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs,” recalls Wolfgang Leonhard, a member of Ulbricht’s original Berlin group who has since defected to the West, “Ulbricht assigned every department head and his staff—some 40 appointments, down to the motor-pool boss—in about an hour.”

Ulbricht’s close ally was the Red army and its local commander, powerful, squat Marshal Georgy Zhukov, whose troops helped get the newspapers, power plants and factories going again, and supplied the necessary pressure to force local leaders to line up behind the Moscow-trained German Communists. In return Moscow got Ulbricht’s unstinting support ‘for the wholesale looting of East Germany, a maneuver that began with the arrival of the very first Soviet regiments. The looting was called reparations, and before it was over, between $11 billion and $18 billion in German equipment—railroads, factories, barges, even plumbing from a jail—had been hauled away for the benefit of Russia’s backward and war-devastated economy.

Party “United.” Ulbricht approved wholeheartedly. “The Soviet Union is justified in claiming reparations. It is our obligation to fulfill these claims punctually,” he told his aides. He was too busy consolidating his new political gains to worry overmuch about the rape of his country.* By early 1946 he had swallowed up the only major opposition to a complete Communist takeover, the huge, old Social Democratic Party. At a mass meeting packed with Ulbricht’s followers, the Social Democratic Party was killed and the Socialist Unity Party (S.E.D.)—Communist to the core—was constructed.

Getting a Title. Ulbricht’s land did not become a “nation” until three years later, after the long Soviet struggle to force the U.S. and its Western allies out of Berlin had failed. Moscow did not give up easily; week after week, in the four-power Kommandatura that administered the city, Soviet Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky vetoed, bellowed, threatened, cajoled, then finally walked out. With that, the Soviet blockade began. When it, too, proved fruitless after the West’s mammoth airlift, Moscow gave its puppet Ulbricht “sovereignty” and a new national name for his trapped millions: the German Democratic Republic.

That was in October 1949. Already Communism’s East German boss had laid the foundations for a decade of terror, repression, poverty and hunger for the 17.4 million people whose fate he had inherited. Ulbricht began “building socialism” with tried and true techniques: a Five-Year Plan, nationalization of industry, merciless stamping out of opposition political groups, throttling of the press and radio, farm delivery quotas and the buildup of a paramilitary police force—the Volkspolizei—that spent much time drilling with submachine guns, no time at all giving traffic tickets.

Then, in June 1953, after Stalin had died, Moscow ordered Ulbricht’s S.E.D. to admit publicly that it had been too harsh. Food ration cards, taken away as punishment, were returned to thousands, and Protestant church groups, recently expelled from schools, were reinstated.

To the politically sensitive East Germans, it all seemed a confession of weakness ; many thought that the Russians had decided to abandon their Ulbricht puppet. Suddenly, on June 16, East Germany’s workers were in the streets; thousands went on strike, marched in Communism’s East Berlin showcase boulevard, Stalin-allee. Spontaneously, the nation was seething with revolt.

For two days, the mobs ran wild. Then, like a horde of waddling ducks, hundreds of Soviet tanks clattered out of their garrisons and into all the major towns; Moscow, it seemed, had not abandoned Comrade Ulbricht after all. Workers hurled bricks at the tanks and curses at their own jack-booted People’s Police, but they had no arms or organization. Bitterly, docilely, East Germany’s grey millions returned to work and settled down to years of hopelessness.

An End to Baptism. Since then Walter Ulbricht has ruled his people with deft application of both the carrot and the stick, always careful to keep in step with the word from Moscow. In 1956, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the 20th Party Congress, Stalin’s old friend Ulbricht was quick to echo the new line (“One cannot reckon Stalin among the classic Marxists”). For all the thaw, Ulbricht soon cracked down on students and teachers who had friendly ideas of their own, arresting dozens, expelling scores from their universities. To stamp out religion and give new meaning to socialism, Ulbricht introduced “socialist name-giving” ceremonies to replace baptism, “socialist marriage” rituals to replace church weddings. Orders went out to force thousands of private storekeepers and handicraft shops into state-run cooperatives. More orders were issued to build a fire under the peasants who still largely declined to join the collective farms.

Early last year, collectivization was finally completed in a frenzied, three-month drive that sent thousands of farmers fleeing to the West and damaged even further East Germany’s limping food production. Today no East German goes hungry, but his grocery supplies are at best erratic. Although formal rationing was finally abandoned in 1958, milk is in such short supply that it no longer is readily available; butter is distributed at the rate of a half-pound per person every ten days; beef is a rare luxury. To push a substitute. Ulbricht’s regime in 1959 introduced “pony bars,” restaurants that sell nothing but horse meat and urge customers to try “stallion steak,” “foal filet,” “goulash from the harness.”

Girls on the Job. But these material facts of life were not the main force that sent 160,000 East Germans fleeing from their country this year. Under Walter Ulbricht’s Communism, life is a dreary procession of rules and slogans that dragoon mind as well as body. At the Karl Marx Oberschule (elementary school) in Leipzig, kids are urged to keep an ear peeled at home for anti-Communist remarks by their parents; placards on the schoolroom walls proclaim “The Party Is Right” and “Struggle Today to Halt Atom War Tomorrow!” In the desperate labor shortage, tens of thousands of schoolchildren are taken from their studies to work several hours a week in factories and fields; already 88% of all girls between the ages of 18 and 20 are at work, and pressure is on as well to force women over 30 to take jobs.

Virtually all the comfortable old neighborhood Bierstuben have been forced out of business. Today the German worker must take his evening glass of beer at the big, bleak, state-run HO halls, where portraits of Lenin and old Spitzbart (pointed beard, i.e., Ulbricht) look down mockingly from the walls.

For doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers and professors, professional success is a state crime; last month the regime rejected 12,000 of 28,000 high school graduates applying for admission to universities. The reason: “bourgeois” family backgrounds. Virtually no one gets to college without having first worked in a factory or on a collective farm.

There is also the ever present aura of fear. As one refugee put it: “The police no longer drag people out of their houses in the middle of the night. But the agents are still everywhere. You sit in a movie house watching a film, and suddenly the lights go on and you wait while the Vopos walk down the aisle looking everyone over. You wonder who they are after. When they motion to someone to get up and go with them, you relax. But the next time it could be you … I couldn’t take that any more.”

No More Planes. For all its troubles, East Germany today is the sixth largest industrial manufacturer in the world (after the U.S., Russia, West Germany, Great Britain, France). Yet the stern program announced three years ago to match West German per capita consumption by 1961 failed miserably, is no longer even mentioned. Largely at fault is the huge drain on the economy resulting from shipments of heavy industrial equipment to the rest of the Soviet bloc; East Germany is the machine shop for Russia (it produces one-half of the Soviet Union’s total ma chine imports) and half a dozen other satellite nations. So great is the strain on the economy that Ulbricht’s planners last March abruptly put East Germany’s airplane industry out of business so that raw materials and labor could be used elsewhere.

Despite his age and occasional bouts of ill health (liver and gall bladder), Ulbricht runs his country with undiminished authority, working as many as 18 hours a day. barking rapid-fire orders in his high-pitched voice. There is only a bare pretense of democracy. Technically, Ulbricht’s S.E.D. rules not alone, but with four other parties (including a sham offshoot of West Germany’s Christian Democratic Party) in a National Front whose united list of candidates is presented to voters at each election with no other choices. After the election rituals, the S.E.D. always gains control of the Volkskammer (Peoples’ Chamber), a rubber-stamp legislature that follows Ulbricht’s every nod.-

Still Hope. Walter Ulbricht will never be happy until his troubled land is elevated from occupied status to become a full-fledged, sovereign nation. This Nikita Khrushchev has promised time and time again since 1958, as he has threatened to sign a peace treaty and let the German Democratic Republic take over its own affairs (including control of the West’s presence in, and access to, Berlin). The current mood in Moscow is to give Ulbricht his treaty this fall. So far, virtually no important non-Communist nation has recognized the G.D.R. diplomatically, but Ulbricht is working feverishly for what he considers East Germany’s due reward. “We are strong,” he cries. “The world one day must deal with us.”

In a sense, the West has speeded him on his way by tacit acceptance of Berlin’s border closure. For, in effect. East Berlin is now no longer under four-power military control (basic to all Western rights in Berlin), but is a part of East Germany itself. Now Walter Ulbricht can press with even greater effect his argument that the West’s presence in West Berlin no longer can be guaranteed by the rights of “ancient” armed conquest. Sign a new agreement with the German Democratic Republic, he will soon suggest, and you can have your access to West Berlin. It this request is successful, de facto recognition will automatically have occurred and Ulbricht will have scored a singular triumph.

As the week’s events began to unfold, a nightmarish vision flashed momentarily across the minds of thousands of West Berliners—a vision that they too might one day be forced to live under Walter Ulbricht’s ugly system. After the long years of tension during which the city—and the West—stood up to Russian threats, freedom seemed at last to be slipping away. But at week’s end, when U.S. troops began moving up the Autobahn, crossing Communist territory to reinforce the West Berlin garrison, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson flew in to add the weight of his prestige, most West Berliners knew that it was far too early for them to give up hope.

* In Rome, the Vatican took the occasion to test the Communists’ intentions further by appointing an East German as new Roman Catholic Bishop of Berlin. He is Monsignor Alfred Bengsch, 39, who probably will find it difficult indeed to travel from his East Berlin home to visit the western half of his diocese.

* Herself an up and coming agitprop leader who later was highly commended in the Communist press for denning a new sin: “practicism,” the “neglect of Communist ideology through everyday worries and overwork.’ Ll-bricht finally married Lotte in 1951—Or about the rape of his country’s women. At one of the first party meetings in Berlin, some Communists urged that abortion be legalized for German girls made pregnant by rampaging Russian soldiers. “There can be no question of it,” Ulbricht snapped. “It is quite impossible. People who get so worked up about such things today should have got worked up when Hitler began the war.” -Ulbricht holds the Volkskammer in such contempt that he did not even show up at the session when the chamber was invited to approve the decision to seal off the Berlin sector frontier.