Authors: Frederick Taylor
Only the Germans wholeheartedly wanted their entire country back, and at this juncture they had little say in the matter.
Adenauer was chosen as chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany by its newly elected parliament. He won by just one vote. Born in January 1876 (two days after Communist leader Wilhelm Pieck) to a pious middle-class Catholic family in the Rhine Province of Prussia, Adenauer studied law and served his native city of Cologne as a legal official. Later he went into politics for the Catholic Centre Party, first elected as a city councillor, then assistant burgomaster, and finally (from 1917) High Burgomaster of the city.
Adenauer became a prominent figure in the Weimar Republic. From 1921 to 1933, he was president of the Prussian State Council, the second chamber of the state’s parliament, made up of representatives of the city and provincial assemblies. Afer 1945, he helped found the Christian Democratic Party, which hoped to unite Catholic and Protestant Christians in creating a socially aware but broadly conservative post-war German state.
As a leading member of the CDU in the British Zone, Adenauer was asked to chair the constituent council that drew up the constitution for the Trizonia state. Like the venerable George Washington, who in 1776 had occupied a similar position in the Continental Congress, Adenauer, at the age of seventy-three, would now occupy the highest position in the state over whose creation he had presided.
Extremes were utterly foreign to him. He had little time for the absolutist Right. On the other hand, he was also a firm Catholic anti-Communist. He looked at central and eastern Germany and saw an ‘unreliable’ electorate that was not only predominantly Protestant but had tended to support radicalism, of the brown-shirted or red-flagged persuasion. Adenauer was a patriot, but was not prepared to sacrifice his vision of a Western-orientated, Christian Germany on the altar of unity.
It was the firebrand Social Democrat leader Kurt Schumacher who, though also fiercely anti-Communist, yearned to restore German unity. Schumacher was a Prussian from the east, born in what had become Poland. His savage attacks against Adenauer, and his tireless campaigning for German reunification (despite a war wound that would send him to an early grave), established the courageous Schumacher as a legend in the SPD. However, they did nothing to unseat the wily Adenauer, or to attain the goal of unity that Schumacher so passionately sought.
Nine months after Adenauer became leader of the new West German state, something happened that would change the Western powers’ attitude towards the German situation even more drastically than the Berlin Blockade.
At around four a.m. on 25 June 1950, a rainy Sunday morning, North Korean artillery opened fire on South Korean army positions south of the 38th parallel, the line then serving as the border between the two Korean states. The barrage was followed by armoured and infantry attacks all along the parallel. Only at eleven a.m. did North Korea formally declare war.
The Korean War resulted from a situation similar to that in Germany: a country divided according to the positions of Allied forces at the end of the Second World War. A Soviet protégé (Kim Il-sung) had quickly been installed in the north, where Russian troops had the power, as leader of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea; and an American-supported counterpart (a conservative representative of the Korean
ancien régime
, Syngman Rhee) in the south, where US forces held sway and the country was known as the Republic of Korea. Now the Communist side had directly attacked the other.
The rapid advance of the Communist forces terrified everyone in the West. US President Harry S. Truman returned from his home in Independence, Missouri, to Washington, DC, arriving in the early afternoon of that June day in 1950. The UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for the immediate cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of North Korean forces. Instead, the North Koreans advanced and took the South Korean capital, Seoul, at enormous human cost. The war would see-saw back and forth. It would last almost three years and millions of innocent Korean civilians and hundreds of thousands of soldiers would die—including some tens of thousands from the largely Western-supplied United Nations force that was sent to stiffen South Korean resistance.
Stalin’s support for the invasion of North Korea, which extended beyond propaganda to military aid and the use of Soviet pilots to fly combat aircraft, was one of the his last and worst mistakes. Inevitably, many in the West drew the conclusion that Korea was just rehearsal for a similar violent coup in Europe.
The first Soviet atomic bomb had been tested on 29 August 1949. There was rising anxiety in the West. Either Stalin didn’t see this, or he misjudged it. The same might be said for Ulbricht, who immediately made boastful claims that, after South Korea, West Germany would be the next makeshift capitalist state to fall.
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So, what if something similar had happened in Germany? The balance was less equal. West Germany had 50 million people, and the East only around 18.5 million. But there were 300,000 Soviet troops stationed in the Soviet Zone, and in 1946 the East Germans had started to build up paramilitary People’s Police units, initially classified as
Grenzpolizei
(border police) or
Bereitschaftspolizei
(public-order police) but soon organised on a proper military basis and given the title of
Kasernierte Volkspolizei
(People’s Police in Barracks = KVP).
The KVP uniform bore a disturbing similarity to the old
Wehrmacht
garb, as did the jackboots. Only the helmet, an adaptation of the Red Army’s, differed radically from what a Second World War German soldier would have worn. Drill and discipline were tough. Former
Wehrmacht
generals were appointed to regional commanders’ roles. Officers who had been Nazis and in some cases judges in the notorious
military tribunals set up towards the end of the war, were also given prominent positions.
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So, perhaps the means existed in the East to attack. But the will? It seems unlikely. Ulbricht and his Soviet sponsors wished to subvert the West German state. Their propaganda power was channelled ferociously and persistently to this end. Although East German society was at this point further down the road to remilitarisation than West Germany, talk of ‘revanchism’ in Bonn and of a reborn SS had become standard in Communist circles. But a direct military attack on West Germany seems unlikely to have been seriously considered.
The West did not know this. Due to the Korean War, few Americans thought any more of cutting, let alone withdrawing, US forces from Germany.
Earlier that year, Truman had received National Security Council Memorandum No. 68 (NSC-68) in which experts at Defense and State broadly recommended rearmament as a response to Communist ambition and the testing of the Soviet bomb. Then came Korea. Resistance to the recommendations dissolved in the face of clear Communist aggression. The armed-forces budget almost quintupled from $15.5 billion in August 1950 to $70 billion at the end of 1951. By 1952-3, defence expenditure took up 17.8 per cent of American gross national product, versus only 4.7 per cent in 1949. Military expenditure increased in all Western European victor states.
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In shattering what remained of post-war complacency in America, Stalin and Kim Il-sung had awoken a giant who may not have been sleeping, but who had been hoping to get some rest. Throughout the half-decade following the Second World War, there was talk, especially from diplomats, of ‘not upsetting’ the Russians. Now that talk dwindled. Many of these same diplomats were under heavy attack from Republican Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy and his Permanent Investigations Sub-Committee, which was reaching the zenith of its inquisitorial power.
For the people of the Western sectors of Berlin, the intensified Cold War had paradoxical effects. On the one hand, the dangers for the capitalist-democratic boat bobbing in the dark sea of Stalinist rule appeared more threatening than ever. On the other, the
solidarity of the NATO powers and the USA in the face of Communist ambition meant that the West was much less likely to quietly abandon Berlin.
The blockade had turned West Berliners from washed-up Nazis into anti-Communist heroes. The retention of Allied military rule in Berlin had become a prestige matter. The city was a military and political asset, a valuable listening station and irritant inside the belly of the Red beast. The experience of the blockade had showed that Western rule in Berlin would not succumb to any action short of outright military conquest—which would mean full-scale European, even world war.
Living in West Berlin had been an unpredictable business since 1945, and it remained so. But by 1950 it was also, strangely enough, more secure.
The Basic Law of the Federal Republic did not apply in West Berlin, where the writ of the Allied commandants remained the ultimate power. The grandly titled ‘governing mayor’ (
Regierender Bürgermeister
) of the Western sectors—from November 1948, Ernst Reuter—was responsible to the Western military, who also controlled the West Berlin police and regulated such events as political rallies and demonstrations. In Bonn, West Berlin’s representatives were mere observers.
The partially unfree status of the half-city was a bargain struck for perilous times. In the loss of some rights for West Berliners lay the guarantee of more important ones.
There were now two Berlin city administrations. One in the West and the other in the East. At the same time as Reuter was elected in the Western sectors, in the East a prominent SED man named Friedrich Ebert had been made mayor.
Berlin still functioned, in many ways, as one city. There were signs showing sector borders, occasional checkpoints and restrictions, temporary or permanent, but for a dozen years after the end of the Berlin Blockade, citizens moved freely around the former German capital. Telephone lines, sewage, transport were all shared.
This was all the odder in view of the fact that the long border between the two German states, running 1,381 kilometres (858 miles) from the Baltic coast in the north to the Bavarian forest in the south, where
Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany met, would soon become a fortified and all but impassable barrier.
In the summer of 1945, the victorious Allies established buffer areas and checkpoints on routes that passed between their areas of rule. The initial object was to catch diehard Nazis and war criminals if they tried to cross zonal borders. Then came the problem of smuggling, the movement of money and goods in defiance of the strict Eastern customs regime. None the less, borders remained relatively porous.
In March 1952, the Cold War still seemed frozen solid. Then Stalin surprised the world by sending a note to each of the other three occupying powers—France, Britain and the USA—in which he offered a peace treaty and free elections in a unified Germany. A draft of such a treaty was helpfully included. This was at first sight an amazingly attractive proposal, especially for the Germans; designed, in the words of a recent German writer, echoing Mario Puzo’s
Godfather
, as ‘an offer they couldn’t refuse’.
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The main stipulation was that a reunited Germany, while permitted to rearm for its own defence, must not join any alliance directed against any of its former opponents in the Second World War.
Adenauer dismissed the offer almost immediately. It was argued that the East German government (which would, while negotiations were going on, have constituted an equal partner to West Germany) was not freely elected. This ‘no’ to the Stalin note has since been criticised by historians, including Germans East and West, for ruining a serious chance of painless German reunification without war and thereby condemning the country to almost forty more years of division. To them it is a big black mark against Adenauer’s record.
The West German Chancellor was convinced that only a Germany anchored to the West could survive, at least in a form he found tolerable. ‘Only an economically and spiritually healthy Western Europe under the leadership of England and France,’ Adenauer wrote in 1946, ‘a Western Europe of which the area of Germany not occupied by the Russians forms an essential component part, can halt the spiritual and power-political advance of Asia’. By ‘Asia’ the old Rhinelander clearly meant Stalin’s Russia.
There were, of course, the usual stings in the small print of Stalin’s suggestion. For example, part of his proposal involved the recognition of
the eastern Oder-Neisse boundary for a reunited Germany. This meant the permanent abandonment of the ancient Prussian heartlands of East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania, only a handful of years after their populations had been violently expelled. This concession alone would have wrecked Adenauer’s party, in which the vocal refugee organisations representing these millions of expellees played a powerful and uncompromising role. An opinion poll threatened catastrophe for any party that abandoned the ‘eastern territories’: two-thirds of ordinary Germans were against attaining reunification at that price.
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It would be another forty years before a bold German leader, empowered by post-Cold War euphoria, would be able to officially recognise the new boundaries.
After his proposals were turned down by the West, Stalin received the East German leadership in Moscow. He told Ulbricht and his colleagues that he was resigned to a divided Germany and instructed them to ‘organise your own state’. As for the porous border between the former Soviet Zone and the West, it had become a danger. The East Germans must therefore ‘strengthen the protection of this frontier’.
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The GDR leaders didn’t waste time, or scruples, in carrying out this command. The zone border was closed, and its transformation into a fortified international boundary began. The project carried the startlingly brutal title of ‘Operation Vermin’ (
Aktion Ungeziefer
).