Authors: Frederick Taylor
The hostages set off for the sector border, just ten minutes’ drive away. They had scarcely gone a kilometre when a Russian jeep, full of armed soldiers, blocked their way. Some of the Stumm police were kept in custody and ended up spending months in the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.
When the American representative on the
Kommandatura
entered Kotikov’s office to deliver a protest, he was told that ‘peaceful workers’ petitioning the city assembly had been assaulted by Western soldiers and ‘black guards’ from West Berlin (equating the Stumm police with the Nazi SS). It was he, Kotikov, who should be protesting, was it not?
It became clear that anything like a democratic government in the Eastern part of the city was impossible. The SMA moved into city halls in the Eastern districts and began to dismiss employees who were not SED members. Western city councillors, meeting at the Free University, agreed to hold new elections in November.
On 9 September, 250,000 Berliners thronged the
Platz der Republik
(Republic Square) in front of the Reichstag to hear their leaders urge them to hold out against the blockade and oppose attempts to topple their elected representatives.
Ensuing demonstrations began in the British sector, but spilled over into the Soviet sector just by the Brandenburg Gate. The reaction of the Eastern police was prompt. A dozen demonstrators ended up in hospital, ten with bullet wounds. A sixteen-year-old boy was shot in the stomach and bled to death. Five demonstrators were arrested by the East sector police and condemned to twenty-five years’ hard labour by a Soviet military court. After international protests, the Soviets were forced to cut the sentences. In explanation for this unaccustomed clemency, they said that the impressionable young men had been fired up by ‘Fascistic, provocative’ speeches.
The Soviet blockade of Berlin still had eight months to run. However, from now until 1990, Berlin was divided, both politically and administratively. For three years the Allied Control Commission, based there, was supposed to have been the ruling body for the whole country, pending a peace treaty with a reunited Germany. The ACC was now a dead letter. And within a year there would be two German states.
Even now, with that decisive development still to come and relative freedom of movement remaining between Eastern and Western sectors, there was no longer any point in pretending that Berlin was still the capital of Germany. It wasn’t even one city any more, though it wasn’t yet clearly two.
‘DISSOLVE THE PEOPLE AND ELECT ANOTHER’
FEW DRAWN-OUT HISTORICAL
events or processes came to their ends on the conveniently precise dates cited in the history books. The Berlin Blockade was no exception.
A few seconds after midnight on 12 May 1949, a corporal of the British Royal Corps of Military Police opened the iron gate at the Helmstedt crossing point on the border between the British and the Soviet zones. For the first time in almost a year, a convoy of cars and trucks moved through, heading along the autobahn towards Berlin. At 1.23 a.m., a British military train, pulled by a German engine and driven by a German engineer, set off for Berlin. The first vehicle coming from Berlin arrived at Helmstedt around two that morning, a car driven by an American.
But all was not yet quite what it seemed. Within a very short time, it became obvious that the Soviets had replaced the blockade with a new set of hindrances and restrictions.
After lengthy negotiations about the lifting of the blockade, the SMA had sneaked in a last-minute stipulation that there should be only sixteen trains a day. These must be pulled by Eastern engines and manned by Eastern crews. Moroever, they changed timetables without notice, delayed military trains so that the journey between Helmstedt and Berlin took seven hours instead of two, and produced lists of forbidden exports from Berlin that left 90 per cent of the city’s trade impossible. Trucks were forbidden to travel on the autobahn at night. All mail and postal traffic still had to come in by air, since the Soviets diverted mail trains to their sector and would not release their cargoes.
On 18 May, 400 food trucks were stuck at the border due to Russian
demands for a stamp from the German Economic Commission, an organ of the occupation regime controlled by Soviet appointees. Barge traffic, a large proportion of the city’s trade, was held up by Soviet demands for crew lists and transit permits.
1
Bizarrely, within days of its apparent salvation, Berlin was paralysed from within by a transport strike. The dispute’s cause was a political and economic powerplay. The S-Bahn (overground city railway) was part of the old German railways, the
Deutsche Reichsbahn
. The Directorate of the
Reichsbahn
(the RBD) was Soviet-controlled, and paid its railwaymen in East marks even after the D-Mark was introduced. The 15,000 of these who lived in West Berlin found themselves in real distress, unable to pay for goods and services. On 20 May, these employees refused to operate the rail network in Berlin and also the routes to western Germany. They occupied many stations and disabled the signals and the tracks.
The Soviet response was to send Eastern-sector police not only into Eastern stations but into Western ones, including the main Zoo station. There was shooting. Several strikers were wounded and one killed. For a state that claimed to represent the workers to behave in this fashion was, to say the least, interesting.
The British, in response, sent Stumm police into Charlottenburg, and then to Zoo. After three-sided scuffles between Eastern- and Western-sector police on the one hand and strikers on the other, the Easterners withdrew. It wasn’t until 24 May that the Eastern police agreed to withdraw from all Western rail facilities. Days of negotiations stretched into weeks. The Easterners, whose own economy and distribution networks were starting to be affected, offered up to 60 per cent of the men’s wages in West marks.
The offer was refused. The strikers were getting strike pay and unemployment benefit—all in hard D-Marks—which made them better off staying on strike than going back to work. Two further compromise packages were turned down. The Allies found themselves in a quandary. Was this not the democracy they were claiming to introduce? Were not workers within their rights to strike for the pay rate they desired?
In the end, on 26 June, the Western commandants made a final offer to the transport strikers. First the carrot: the Allied authorities would
make up the men’s wages to full D-Mark equivalents for three months, and the city government would find alternative work for anyone who was afraid to go back to work for the RBD. Then the stick: anyone who stayed out on strike got no more welfare payments.
On 1 July, the S-Bahn reopened. From the following day, trains to other destinations, most importantly western Germany, were running once more.
From now on, for four decades, the Allies and the West Berlin authorities would ensure there was always enough food and fuel for the city to keep going. A reserve of five months’ supplies became standard, in case of a new blockade.
The Soviets and the German Communists continued with their obstructionism and carried on with aggressive attempts to undermine West Berliners’ morale. A four-power conference in Paris about Berlin—called as part of the blockade settlement—broke up on 20 June after a month of pettifogging argument, with only the vaguest of ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ regarding long-term access to Berlin from the West.
Meanwhile, an event of far more importance to the future of the city and of Germany had already occurred. On 23 May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany came into being.
The expropriation of the big landowners in the Soviet Zone, plus widespread nationalisation of private companies and banks there, guaranteed well before the end of 1946 that the economies of the Soviet Zone and the other three had already dramatically diverged. Even then, Ulbricht’s SED was fully in charge.
Stalin’s policy of keeping his options open in the matter of German unity became all but untenable. He could instruct the few Communists in the West German constituent assembly not to sign the basic law that established the Federal Republic, and they obeyed. His propaganda machine could breathe fire and brimstone against the ‘fascists’, ‘capitalists’ and ‘revanchists’ in the West, and it did. But, short of invasion, Stalin could do little to stop the creation of a three-quarter-size version of Germany west of the Elbe.
In fact, the very name of the new West German state—the Federal Republic of Germany rather than ‘German Federal Republic’—was a
challenge. It implied that the state represented the whole German land and people. Its provisional seat of government was the modest Rhineland university city of Bonn, which obviously could not be taken seriously as a permanent capital. To have chosen a major city such as Frankfurt or Hamburg would have implied the permanent loss of East Germany and Berlin, which was unacceptable. Right from the start, the West German state viewed itself as the legitimate successor state to the pre-war German Reich.
Moscow was forced to make its move. In May 1949, elections were held in the Soviet Zone for a so-called ‘People’s Congress’ (full name: ‘People’s Congress for Unity and a Just Peace’). In March, Stalin had sanctioned a purge in the SED and reluctantly allowed plans for an East German government and parliament to be drafted. All the same, nothing was done until the West acted. Stalin may have done a lot to cause the division of Germany, but he was determined not to be blamed for it.
2
The elections took place for the first time on a basis that would become all too familiar: the single-list ballot. This offered a pre-decided list of candidates from the so-called ‘block’ parties that, whatever their official names, were controlled by the SED. Electors could vote either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (since there were no alternative candidates, purely a protest vote). Under the circumstances, the 66 per cent ‘yes’ vote—34 per cent daring to register fruitless dissent—was scarcely a ringing endorsement. At the next elections the ‘yes’ vote suddenly increased to 90 per cent plus, and stayed unwaveringly at that level throughout the history of East Germany.
The 2,000-member People’s Congress met in the Russian sector of Berlin and selected a People’s Council of 330 members. On 30 May, a constitution for the ‘German Democratic Republic’ was agreed. But even as a Marxist-Leninist state was being assembled, the rhetoric of German unity remained official usage in the Soviet Zone. Sometime between the elections to the West German federal parliament, the
Bundestag
, on 15 August 1949, and the emergence of the first West German government a month later, the balance tipped.
On 16 September 1949, the venerable Catholic politician, Konrad Adenauer, became chancellor in Bonn. That same day, an East German delegation in Moscow agreed on the foundation of a separate state in the Soviet Zone. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was formally
established on 7 October 1949. Pieck, the veteran KPD leader, became president, while Grotewohl, the former Social Democrat, became provisional prime minister, pending elections of whose outcome there could be no doubt. Ulbricht, First Secretary of the SED, remained the real power in the land.
The new government took over most functions of the SMA. The SED’s security service became the Ministry for State Security (
Ministerium für Staatssicherheit = Stasi
). Its role was to persecute opponents of the Communist state and protect state and party apparatus against subversion. To this end it established a labyrinthine system of informers, agents and
provocateurs
. Like the Federal Republic, and the Weimar Republic before, the GDR took as its flag the black-red-gold banner of the 1848 revolutionaries. The flag remained indistinguishable from the West’s until 1959, when the GDR symbol of a hammer (for the workers) and a compass (for the intellectuals) inside ears of grain (for the farmers) was placed at its centre to give it a clear identity.
So now there was a capitalist and a Communist Germany. The seat of the GDR government was declared to be Berlin. The people of the Western sectors, embarking on their first post-blockade winter, were surrounded not just by Russian occupiers but by a separate German state, with its capital in the eastern part of the Berliners’ own city.
The Berlin blockade signalled the advent of the ‘hard’ Cold War. Relations between the West and the Soviet Union finally deteriorated from disillusioned and sporadically violent bickering to a kind of undeclared conflict.
Nineteen forty-nine also saw the establishment of the Communist People’s Republic of China under the brilliant and ruthless Mao Tsetung. The American-backed former Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, was driven from the mainland. He took his government, army, and even his parliament to the offshore island of Formosa (Taiwan). There, for the rest of his long life, he fulminated against the theft of his country. Nationalist or Kuomintang parliamentarians, still officially representing Shanghai, Chungking or Canton, based on the elections of November 1947, sat for decades in a ghostly assembly, the
Yuan
, in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, and tried to behave as if China was still theirs.
The German situation was different. Two Germanys had arisen because of disagreements among the victorious anti-Hitler coalition. Both sides knew that Germany, even in its weakened and truncated post-1945 condition, was the key to Central Europe, and perhaps even of the entire continent.
America would have liked to bring the whole of Germany over to the Western, capitalist camp, but had decided, when it became clear this was unlikely to happen, to settle for less; similarly, Stalin would have loved to get a united Germany under his influence, but would, as it turned out, be prepared to keep just the bit that he held.
3
By contrast, the remaining two Allies—France, especially, but also Britain—were not at all displeased by a disunited Germany. They could, of course, never admit this to the Germans for fear of hurting their feelings.