Authors: Frederick Taylor
Nor was Walter Ulbricht any help. For a while he had been turning the screw on the rights of West German citizens to enter East Berlin, and on West Berliners to travel there with West German passports. But on 23 September 1960, on his own initiative, Ulbricht suddenly announced that all Western diplomats accredited to the West German government would have to obtain permission from the GDR Foreign Ministry in East Berlin before entering either the Eastern sector of Berlin or the territory of the GDR proper.
Free movement between West Germany and Berlin by Allied diplomats had been a routine matter for fifteen years. When Walter Dowling, US ambassador in Bonn, heard of this new outrage, he flew direct to West Berlin. There he sat himself in an official car with diplomatic number plates, flying the American flag, and presented himself at the border with East Berlin. The East German guard refused to let him pass. Dowling insisted on his rights. Despite the official paraphernalia festooning the car, the guard demanded identification. Dowling did then show his ID, thus conceding the guard’s right to demand it and surrendering his own right to unimpeded access to the Eastern sector.
19
The Allies argued that the
Grepo
(border policeman) was simply a local agent of the Soviet authorities and therefore basic four-power rights were unaffected. All the same, Ulbricht had won a victory of sorts in his war of attrition.
But his Soviet superiors were displeased. He had not consulted them. For a satellite country to conduct policy independently in this way was unheard of.
20
As the long-suffering Soviet ambassador in East Berlin, Mikhail Pervukhin, told Moscow with weary understatement, there was ‘a certain inflexibility of the GDR leaders in practical activity concerning West Berlin’.
Exasperated, Khrushchev demanded that Ulbricht desist from further provocations until they next met at the end of November. Ulbricht backed down for the moment. Their point made, the East Germans no longer insisted on prior applications from Western diplomats.
Khrushchev and Ulbricht met in Moscow on 30 November 1960. The encounter took place just after the end of an almost three-week-long conference of eighty-one Communist and workers’ parties, during which the headline subject had been the difficulties between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.
At this mini-summit with Khrushchev, Ulbricht bemoaned the GDR’s continuing economic difficulties, for which he blamed not his rigid command economy, but dependency on Western imports (particularly machinery and spare parts from the Federal Republic). Plus, of course, there was West German political interference and the poaching of his qualified work-force, attracted by higher salaries, resettlement grants, and the more ready availability of consumer goods in the West. ‘We shall,’ Ulbricht concluded, ‘try to protect ourselves from these unpleasant things, and the number of conflicts in Berlin will increase…’
The Soviet leader reminded Ulbricht that he, Khrushchev, had an agreement with the Americans. There would be no basic change in the status quo over Berlin until he had a chance to discuss the world situation with the new American President at the forthcoming summit, projected for summer 1961. The West must never be able to accuse Nikita Khrushchev of bad faith. Under no circumstances, it was made clear to Ulbricht, would Soviet forces move into West Berlin. Instead, Khrushchev suggested, ‘we will work out with you a tactic of gradually crowding out the Western powers from West Berlin, but without war’.
21
Ulbricht was to behave like a good, obedient satellite leader.
Not for the first time, Khrushchev’s hopes proved illusory. Ulbricht was a master of pinprick politics, of creating facts on the ground by changes so small that only the keenest observer could realise his ultimate aim. He kept to the letter but not to the spirit of his agreement with Khrushchev.
Throughout the winter of 1960-1, the East Germans continued to harass border-crossers and German trans-sector visitors. There were temporary closures of crossing points, spot checks, swoops on public
transport at the sector borders at which East Berliners who worked in West Berlin were turned back, and threatened with future punishment if they persisted. But all this was done within existing practice.
Planning for the superpower summit was meanwhile still in its earliest stages, but that did nothing to deter Ulbricht. He raised the subject of a full Berlin border closure again in January 1961 and pressed for it to be on the agenda at the Warsaw Pact meeting in late March.
The East German leader had it all worked out. He just needed Khrushchev to say the word.
Ulbricht’s amazingly stubborn and persistent
modus operandi
was largely what had brought him to supreme power in the GDR. It was almost a pity that his outstanding (though by no means attractive) qualities were confined to such a small stage as that of the sickly, synthetic, seventeen-million-strong client state over which he ruled.
Ulbricht was also bolstered by a bizarre personality cult within the GDR, comparable with that of Stalin and certainly more conspicuous than the relatively modest status accorded to Khrushchev in contemporary Marxist-Leninist hagiolatry.
The young East German writer Brigitte Reimann noted in her diary that year:
The personality cult never flourished before as it does today. Our writers are not ashamed to write slimy abominations in which they compare him with the great, truly great, Lenin. There are ‘Ulbricht shrines’, the whole thing reeks of religious nonsense.
22
Reimann was a convinced Marxist who hoped that eventually the regime would come good. Others were not so idealistic, nor so patient. They continued to flood into West Berlin, especially as the months passed and Ulbricht’s ‘pinprick’ policy continued.
Once across the border, such ‘deserters’ would identify themselves as refugees from the GDR. They would then be directed to Marienfelde reception camp.
Marienfelde lay in the far south of West Berlin’s Schöneberg district, part of the American sector. An enclosed, somewhat depressing complex
of barracks-like accommodation blocks and processing halls. The camp had been built to cope with West Berlin’s new status as the ‘escape hatch’ from the GDR after Ulbricht sealed off the main German/German border in the summer of 1952. It had been opened in 1953, shortly before the 17 June uprising. The frantic exodus that followed the uprising flooded its facilities to overflow. Marienfelde became internationally famous.
Emigrants would be interviewed on arrival, to ascertain their wishes and filter out possible East German spies. They would stay at Marienfelde until flown out to West Germany proper, where accommodation and jobs would be arranged.
Those who wanted to remain in West Berlin faced difficulties. The half-city was better off than the East, but it was not booming in the way of the Federal Republic. Refugees were automatically sent to West Germany, where there was a need for skilled labour of all kinds, or where, if qualified, they could study.
Joachim Trenkner, a doctor’s son from a provincial town in Thuringia, arrived in West Berlin ‘with a twenty-pfennig one-way train ticket’ towards the end of 1959. Twenty-four years old, he had decided to escape what he described as ‘the stink of petit-bourgeois GDR provincial life’. Joachim had studied engineering at Leipzig University, frequently visited Berlin, and liked what he saw there. He could have continued to study any subject he liked in West Germany. The trouble was, he loved Berlin and wanted to stay in the divided city.
At Marienfelde, Joachim endured questioning by all three Allied intelligence services, then made the wearying progress from office to office, bureaucrat to bureaucrat, before gaining the precious Western identity card that entitled him to live and work in the Federal Republic. Successfully delaying attempts to put him on a plane to West Germany, he found that there were, in fact, certain categories of person permitted to stay in West Berlin. One was industrial fitters, of which there was a shortage there. Joachim had actually taken a factory-based practical course before going on to study in Leipzig. So, this somewhat bookish young man, flourishing his East German certificate, went to work in a West Berlin factory, situated just on the other side of the street from the East but a whole universe away.
There were adjustment problems, of course. On the factory floor,
Joachim’s mid-German accent led at first to his being referred to by his rough-edged Berlin-born colleagues as ‘Saxon shit’ (
Sachsenscheisse
). Ulbricht was conspicuously from Saxony, as were many other leading East German Communists. The presence of so many carpet-bagging Saxon careerists in East Berlin caused Berliners to describe them disparagingly as ‘the fifth occupying power’. Unsurprisingly, Joachim quickly modified his native burr into an approximation of the local argot.
Joachim eventually moved from the ‘hopelessly over crowded’ refugee camp to a small furnished room near his new workplace. He was earning West marks, and found that he could cross the street into East Berlin and ‘suddenly I was Croesus’.
For a Westerner, a beer in the pub on the eastern side of the street cost just a quarter or a third of the price of what you had to pay in the West—according to the rate of exchange. We Westerners could visit a hairdresser for a few pfennigs, for a handful of change we could spend an evening at the State Opera in East Berlin, or the Berliner Ensemble theatre. For a few marks, we could go into state-owned stores and buy records or books. East Berlin was a shopping paradise, a kind of duty-free port. The only thing was, you mustn’t let yourself be caught with this low-priced booty on your way back into West Berlin. Of course, at that time we did not know how long the East German state could go on permitting this ‘fire sale’ situation, or how long, with the refugees still pouring over the border into the West, it would be able to cope with the loss of its human life blood. But by the beginning of 1961, at the latest, we were discussing this subject every day. There were heated debates among friends and work mates, and everyone sensed that something dramatic was going to happen. But a wall right through the city, as was occasionally suggested? No, our imaginations didn’t stretch that far…
23
Here was just one more son of the GDR who slipped westwards in the final months when Berlin was still an open city. Joachim owed the workers’ and peasants’ state his education, or so its leaders insisted. While the decision to cross the border had been his alone—he simply wanted more than the East could give—it was not surprising that Ulbricht and co. blamed wicked Western machinations for the loss of
such precious human assets. They were, after all, hardly going to blame themselves.
During the early months of 1961, the East began to ratchet up its propaganda machine. There was talk of ‘people-trafficking’, of innocent East German citizens being lured west by bribes, even kidnapped off the streets. There was nothing to prevent the capitalists from infiltrating the GDR to do their evil work. The GDR was left defenceless against the West’s tricks and wiles.
So Ulbricht claimed at the Warsaw Pact meeting in March 1961, when he brought up the subject of Berlin once more:
In this political and economic struggle against our republic [he told the Moscow conference], West Berlin plays the role of the channel with whose help this trade in people is practised, and through which also food and other materials flow out of our republic. West Berlin is therefore a big hole in the middle of our republic, which costs us more than a billion marks each year.
24
There is no written proof from the actual records of the meeting that he made any material suggestions as to how this ‘hole’ night be plugged, bur Jan Sejna, a senior aide to the then Czechoslovak Defence Minister, who later defected to the West, testified that during another session Ulbricht actually did talk about counter-measures. He suggested, so Sejna claimed, plugging it with ‘guard units from our border organs, with barriers, even with barbed wire fences’. The others rejected this as too provocative.
25
However, Khrushchev allowed Ulbricht to start exploring military options to stop the refugee flow, including the closing of the sector border.
26
Two months later, in May, the East Germans (coyly referred to as ‘our friends’) were reported by Ambassador Pervukhin to be pushing the same line, and to blazes with the global priorities of Soviet foreign policy:
Our friends would like to establish now such control on the sector border between democratic and West Berlin which would allow them to, as they say, ‘close the door to the West’ and reduce the exodus of the population from the Republic and weaken the influence of economic conspiracy against the GDR, which is carried out directly from West Berlin.
27
Khrushchev’s options were narrowing down. Ulbricht knew it. Perhaps the Soviet leader did too, but he was determined to change nothing in Berlin until he could sound out Kennedy. The long-awaited Soviet-American summit had now been fixed for the first week of June in Vienna.
Khrushchev wanted to look Kennedy in the eye and see if he looked as though he would start a war over Berlin. He knew that among the President’s entourage were some who favoured a variation of the ‘free city’ solution for West Berlin. Ever an optimist and a gambler, perhaps Khrushchev hoped against reason that Ulbricht’s embarrassingly repressive solution to the problem could be avoided after all.
It goes against most received wisdom in the West, even now, that Khrushchev and his fellow Soviet leaders actually acted rationally in their attempt to deal with the disastrous situation of the GDR and the (to Moscow) equally important fact of an economically and increasingly militarily powerful West Germany.