Authors: Frederick Taylor
A no man’s land five kilometres wide was cleared. In ‘night and fog’ actions planned by the
Stasi
, thousands of people living near the border were removed at short notice from their homes. The authorities concentrated on ‘unreliable’ types such as known anti-Communists, those with close Western contacts, or farmers known to oppose collectivised agriculture. Towns and villages were split in two, families often divided. Barbed wire was laid down along its entire length, and secondary and local roads leading to the border were ripped up in order to prevent access.
Special permits were needed for non-residents to enter the border area. There were further graduations within this: between ‘five kilometre’ permits, the more select band allowed within 500 metres, and the élite permitted to approach the ‘ten metre’ zone without being fired upon (in practice, only officials and border guards).
By no coincidence at all, the day of the border closure, 26 May 1952, was also the day the ‘Germany Treaty’ was signed in Bonn, confirming West Germany’s sovereignty and preparing the way for it to join the anti-Soviet alliance system.
Meanwhile, the Communist regime was tightening its hold on society and economy within the Soviet Zone/GDR. Further purges in the SED were accompanied by a campaign against the churches.
In the past two or three years, the number of people in Eastern Germany who decided to leave everything behind and head westward had increased dramatically. In 1947, around 165,000 people had been detained for ‘illegal’ crossing of the zone border in Thuringia alone, though many of these did not intend to leave, but were merely exercising a casual freedom of movement that before 1945 was taken for granted.
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Three years later, permanent resettlement had become the aim of many ‘illegal’ border-crossers. In 1950, 197,788 headed for the West. The following year saw a slight drop to 165,648. The number of those who chose exile in 1952, including those who left after the border was fortified, increased again to 182,393.
Unlike Poles, Bulgarians, or Czechs, when East Germans crossed the border they did not leave their culture behind. They did not have to learn another language or adjust to a different way of life. In the Federal Republic they could still feel at home—and enjoy not just more political freedom but, especially as the 1950s went on, better conditions and wages than all but a tiny minority enjoyed in the GDR.
If someone wanted to leave East Germany, but did not want to brave the long and now-defended border, they had only to get to Berlin. In Berlin they could cross to the Western sectors. Thence the refugee could fly to West Germany proper without worrying about being arrested by a GDR border patrol and thrown into jail.
There was one more factor that encouraged many to take the step to the West. In July 1952, the SED announced that East Germany was entering the phase of ‘building socialism’, signalling its development into a fully fledged Stalinist-Communist state. Pressure on farmers to join collectivised units increased. Discriminatory measures against churches, intellectuals, business people and so-called ‘border-crossers’ (who lived in East Berlin but worked in the Western sectors) were stepped up. The
West beckoned ever more urgently for those who valued the fruits of their own enterprise.
Ulbricht was quite aware of this. In January 1953, he succeeded in gaining Stalin’s approval for a scheme that would allow the East Germans to station their own guards along the border between the Eastern and Western sectors of Berlin so as ‘to end uncontrolled access to East Berlin from the Western sectors’—and, more to the point, vice versa. It was essentially the charter for a fortified border in Berlin.
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But this was eight years before anything of the sort happened. Just when Ulbricht had his nod from the Soviet dictator, a train of events began that would rock the world to its foundations. It would also bring Ulbricht’s own domination of his new fiefdom into urgent question and test his survival skills to their limit.
In the small hours of the night between 28 February and 1 March 1953, after a lengthy drinking party at his
dacha
outside Moscow, Josef Stalin took to his bedchamber. He remained there well into the next day, which was not unusual. However, when by the evening Stalin had still not emerged, guards hesitantly entered the dictator’s room. They found him motionless by his bed, sprawled in a pool of his own urine. He had suffered a stroke, lost control of his faculties, and never again regained consciousness.
Stalin remained in a coma until his death at the age of seventy-four on 5 March. His passing unleashed a wave of grief among many Russians. To this surprisingly large group, the
vodzh
(leader) was a harsh but protective father figure, who had saved their homeland from Hitler’s hordes and brought about a spectacular increase in its power and prestige. To others, including his closest colleagues in the Communist leadership, he was a homicidal monster, at whose demise they felt little else but profound relief.
At the same time as approving Ulbricht’s plan to seal off Berlin, Stalin also announced the arrest of a group of prominent doctors, whom he accused of poisoning members of the leadership. The physicians were Jewish, allegedly agents of ‘world Zionism’ and the West. There were rumours of a major pogrom. The old man had started to get completely out of control. Some still suspect he was murdered.
Within two weeks of Stalin’s funeral, the new Soviet leadership abandoned the plan to enforce tough border restrictions within Berlin. This would ‘lead to the violation of the established order of city life’ in Berlin, as Foreign Minister Molotov put it. The new leaders wished to embark on a conciliatory course, to pull back from Stalin’s paranoid brinkmanship.
Accordingly, Marshal Chuikov, chairman of the Soviet Control Commission, which liaised with the German Communists, was given clear instructions. Ulbricht had missed the chance to seal his infant republic tight. Worse was to come.
In his advice to Chuikov, Molotov (on behalf of the new leadership in Moscow) made the revolutionary—or perhaps under the circumstances counter-revolutionary—suggestion that the problem of population loss from the GDR should be solved not by shutting the people in but by making their life better. The political system should be less harsh and the economy tailored more towards consumers. Light industry should be given priority over heavy industry. Between 1951 and 1953, 60 per cent of growth in the capital stock of state industry had occurred in the areas of iron, steel, mining and energy. Only 2 per cent had been devoted to the production of consumer goods.
The East German economy was in trouble. In 1952, the budget showed a deficit of 700 million marks. The negative trade balance with other Communist countries was almost 600 million (more than it sounds—these are 1952 prices).
Big brother in Moscow no longer wanted to subsidise Ulbricht’s experiment. The Soviets made some concessions to the East Germans to soften the blow but, as Moscow made clear, the Soviet Union needed to make expensive changes of its own in order to improve the lot of its own people. The GDR leadership’s answer to their problem should be wideranging liberalisation.
All this was anathema to Ulbricht. In his grim way, he was an idealist whose quasi-religious belief in a rigorous command economy constituted a lifelong article of faith. If the masses disliked such a policy, this could not be because it was wrong, but because they lacked the proper political consciousness.
Not all his colleagues shared his unbending views. Rudolf Herrnstadt, editor of the SED newspaper,
Neues Deutschland
(‘New Germany’) and the
head of the secret police, Wilhelm Zaisser, openly supported a more flexible, liberal course and told Ulbricht so. They began talking to Soviet representatives along these lines.
Meanwhile, Ulbricht carried stubbornly on with ‘building socialism’. Farms were sequestered—after their owners had been bankrupted by the machinations of uncooperative state officials. Citizens trying to get round the shortages with a little private trading were prosecuted under a catch-all ‘law for the protection of the people’s property’. This law was also used to persecute the owners of hotels and boarding houses, who represented a reservoir of ‘reactionary’ elements. Thousands had their businesses confiscated or fled to the West (even better for the state, since it made the paperwork easier).
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By 1952, the standard of living of ordinary East Germans had actually declined compared with 1947.
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Production targets were not being met. This was blamed on ‘subversion’ and the corrupting effect of capitalist remnants. Ration cards were withdrawn from ‘bourgeois’ elements such as the self-employed and the owners of rental property. This meant they had to turn to state-owned shops, which were dearer and offered a less wide choice of goods.
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Nearing his sixtieth birthday, Ulbricht celebrated in advance by using the 13th plenum of the Central Committee of the SED on 13-14 May to oust his most likely rival, Franz Dahlem, from the leadership. He piled on more misery by announcing the raising of ‘work norms’ by 10 per cent (making workers do 10 per cent more work for the same wage).
The Moscow leadership was not clear what it wanted. These mixed feelings were revealed in mixed recommendations. For example, the Foreign Ministry’s report on the GDR called, on the one hand, for leniency and liberalisation, while on the other suggesting that GDR citizens visiting East Berlin from the provinces be forced to apply for a special permit. The state gives with one hand, and snatches back with the other. Such mutually contradictory ideas typified an authoritarian system in crisis, feeling its way towards a ‘safe’ level of liberalisation that would leave its power intact, but constantly forced to pull back where it saw danger—which, given the all-embracing and constantly overlapping mechanisms of the system, ended up lurking almost everywhere. Post-Stalinism was already revealing itself as ‘Stalinism Lite’.
This ambivalence was reflected in the discussions among the new Soviet leaders. Khrushchev and Molotov later claimed that Beria, the black eminence of Stalin’s security empire, had wanted to abandon the GDR in favour of a ‘bourgeois, neutral and peaceful’ Germany. According to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Beria declared contemptuously: ‘The GDR? What does it amount to, this GDR? It’s not even a real state. It’s only kept in being by Soviet troops.’
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The package presented by the Soviets to Ulbricht in Moscow between 2 and 4 June 1953 was a compromise. It was nevertheless a bitter pill for him to swallow. The Soviets’ list involved halting forced collectivisation of agriculture, encouraging small and middle-sized enterprises, ensuring universal and fair distribution of ration cards, and switching the emphasis of industrial development from Stalinist-style heavy industry to light and consumer industry. The anti-church campaign was to be reined back, civil rights to be more widely respected, and the finance system reorganised. The aim was not just to staunch the flow of population from the GDR but if possible to tempt the exiles back.
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On their return to East Berlin, the SED Politburo was in almost continuous session from 5 to 9 June, under the supervision of Soviet High Commissioner Semenov. Finally it signalled willingness to enact the reforms. The liberal Herrnstadt was in charge of drafting the announcement. When he suggested to Semenov that they delay its release for two weeks to prepare the people for such radical changes, Semenov replied cuttingly: ‘In two weeks you may not have a state any more.’
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The Politburo communiqué was issued on 11 June. The leadership even admitted that ‘in the past a series of mistakes has been made’. This degree of frankness was unheard of. Secret police reports on the public’s reaction described surprise and pleasure, but also suspicion of the ruling party’s motives.
The one thing missing, however, was any move to rescind the onerous new work norms, which particularly affected workers in manufacturing and construction. In fact, on 11 June, Herrnstadt’s
Neues Deutschland
actually praised the workers for fulfilling the new, more arduous work norms so assiduously.
There was a confusing contradiction even in the pronouncements of the SED’s mouthpiece newspaper. Three days later, Herrnstadt wrote in
the same newspaper, expressing doubt about the new norms and arguing that they should not be imposed ‘dictatorially’ but only after consultation with the workers. The article was passed from hand to hand in factories and construction sites.
Rumours were circulating in East Berlin that Moscow had heavily criticised Ulbricht, his ‘mistaken line’ and the ‘cult of personality’ surrounding him. The Russians were seriously wondering what do about Comrade Ulbricht and his stubbornly unpopular programme of ‘building socialism’. These rumours were true. Ulbricht, a short, superficially unimpressive leader with a strong Saxon accent, had now lost his great protector—a short, superficially unimpressive leader with a strong Georgian accent by the name of Josef Stalin.
It was also said that the Soviets had asked Herrnstadt to submit a new Politburo list that would not include Ulbricht.
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After eight years as Moscow’s loyal though far from tractable instrument, at sixty Walter Ulbricht seemed to be heading for compulsory retirement, to be replaced by someone more in tune with the times.
What saved him was, as Ulbricht had always hoped, the East German working class—though not in any way that, no matter how keenly he searched the dark recesses of his ageing Marxist-Leninist heart, he could ever have imagined.