Authors: Frederick Taylor
‘If anything goes wrong,’ Pervukhin warned Ulbricht, ‘they’ll have both our heads.’
The East German leader insisted that nothing could possibly go awry. At first, he told the Russians that he would oversee everything personally. Then, a few days later, he told them that he had appointed Security Secretary Erich Honecker to handle the practical details.
It would be the biggest job of Honecker’s life, and the one that would finally make—or break—his career.
Honecker would co-ordinate a huge operation in which surprise would be all-important. Surprise used against the Western powers, of course, but also against the GDR’s own people.
The numbers allowed into the secret of the planned border closure would be small Honecker set up his headquarters in an inconspicuous suite of four rooms on the second floor of an East Berlin Police Department building in the Keibelstrasse, behind the Alexanderplatz. Members of the planning group, chosen on a strict need-to-know basis, were: Paul Verner, First Secretary of the Berlin SED; Deputy Prime Minister Willi Stoph; Minister of State Security Erich Mielke; Minister of the Interior Karl Maron and his deputy, Major-General Seifert; Defence Minister Heinz Hoffmann; Transport Minister Erwin Kramer; the East Berlin police chief General Fritz Eikemeier and his aide, Colonel Horst Ende. Honecker’s own operational staff was limited to eight, including army lieutenant-colonel Hübner, his military adviser, and police colonel and Defence Council official Gerhard Exner. Exner would playa key role. He must ensure that, inasmuch as it was visible to outsiders, the whole thing must look like a large but routine police operation.
Handwritten reports on the progress of the project—given the codename ‘Rose’—would be passed to Kvitsinsky and Ambassador Pervukhin by a single designated courier—Ulbricht’s personal body
guard. From the embassy, the documents, detailing matters such as the closing off of the East-West transport system or the shutting-down of the power connections between the sectors, would be forwarded to Moscow likewise by courier. No telephone or radio transmission would be permitted, for security reasons.
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On 7 July, a meeting took place at
Stasi
headquarters, led by the State Security Minister, Erich Mielke.
Mielke, then fifty-three, was a stocky, thickset Berliner. He had belonged to the KPD’s paramilitary wing from his teens onward, and had been forced to flee Germany for Moscow in 1931, even before Hitler came to power, because of his involvement in the politically motivated murder of two Berlin policemen.
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After training at the Lenin School in Moscow as an agitator and undercover agent, Mielke was sent to serve in Spain under the command of NKVD general Alexander Orlov. He became accustomed to using assumed names and ranks. His job seems to have consisted mostly of purging the Spanish Republican ranks of Trotskyites and other perceived ‘traitors’. Physically strong and personally ruthless, he was a perfect ‘enforcer’.
After a period of internment in Southern France following the collapse of Republican Spain, Mielke’s trail goes cold for a while. He later claimed to have worked with the illegal French Communist Party during the war. It seems equally likely that he managed to return to the Soviet Union, where he continued his career as a collaborator with the NKVD.
All that’s known for sure is that Mielke resurfaced in July 1945 in Berlin, when he walked into the offices of the newly re-established German Communist Party. He seemed already to enjoy close contacts in the Soviet Military Administration, implying that he had returned at their behest as one of ‘their’ men.
Put in command of a police district, Mielke climbed both the SED greasy pole and the post-war internal-security ladder with an extraordinary speed that confirms the suspicion that he was the Soviets’ chosen creature. By the end of 1946, Mielke was leader of the Police and Security Department of the SED Central Committee and a vice-president of the DVdI (predecessor to the
Stasi
). From 195, he acted as Deputy Minister of State Security.
In 1957, Mielke finally became head of the
Stasi
. He would remain in
office for thirty years, a Communist J. Edgar Hoover, immovable and all knowing, quietly feared even by his nominal superiors.
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The motto of the
Stasi
betrayed its true nature. It called itself the ‘Sword and Shield of the Party’—not of ‘the people’ or ‘the state’. Just as Mielke was a lifelong conspirator, so the
Stasi
itself was not a police force in any conventional sense but a conspiratorial organisation, created in order to sustain the rule (or ‘leading role’ in Leninist jargon) of a revolutionary party, the SED.
The
Stasi
was proud of this fact. To celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, posters were printed for internal display, telling the story of the organisation’s antecedents not as a pillar of state but as the internal intelligence arm first of the old SPD (created during its years of illegality under Bismarck) and then of the KPD. The
Stasi
retained the mentality of an organ of opposition, and therefore necessarily of deceit. In power, given the SED’s persistent unpopularity, the
Stasi
was a weapon directed against the overwhelming majority of the country’s own people.
At the 7 July meeting, Mielke set in motion initial measures to strengthen security on the main West German-East German border and in the so-called ‘ring around Berlin’. The latter had been created after the 1953 uprising, enabling joint GDR/Soviet forces to close off all movement between East Berlin and East Germany proper in the event of a political crisis.
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No one below Mielke had an overall view of what all this was for. The new level of activity was generally explained as ‘preparations for the signing of a peace treaty with the Soviet Union’. Police patrols on the transport routes and at crossover points into West Berlin were stepped up. Colonel Gerhard Harnisch, ex-principal of the
Stasi
’s training school, was made chair of a commission that would supposedly study how to tighten things up further. Mielke would by this point have been totally aware of existing plans to tighten things further by sealing off the sector borders, so Harnisch’s commission may have been a deception measure, to further conceal the purpose of the mobilisation from rank-and-file
Stasi
members.
The strengthening of the Readiness Police and Special Security Police ordered at the beginning of June was now complete, but this was only part of the preparations for ‘Rose’. Honecker and Stoph, a former Minister
of Defence, put together an overview of what internal resources the regime could rely on. Apart from 8,200 ordinary police, almost 4,000 Readiness Police and 1,500 Special Security Police, they decided that they could call on 12,000 members of East Berlin’s factory militias, the so-called
Betriebskampfgruppen
.
These paramilitary units of loyalist workers had been established after the 1953 uprising as a backup for the state in case of emergency. The factory militias were armed with automatic weapons (often of antique Soviet provenance), light machine guns and even flak artillery, plus the kind of crude anti-tank weapons that had been issued to Hitler’s
Volkssturm
in the dying days of World War Two.
To this total could be further added 4,500 armed
Stasi
operatives, and 10,000 regular East German army troops stationed in or around Berlin. If things got badly out of hand, more units could be transferred from Saxony, which was seen as relatively loyal to the regime.
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The Soviets had spent the first months of the year reinforcing and reequipping their forces in the GDR in anticipation of a showdown over Berlin. Now the Soviets moved to take strategic charge of the affair. Moscow had no intention of letting its self-willed East German satellite leader call the entire tune.
On 15 July, the commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact’s forces, Marshal Andrei Grechko, put the East German People’s Army on a state of heightened alert, at the same time placing it under the command of the Commander of Soviet Forces in Germany. Ten days later, on the day of Kennedy’s TV address, a secret meeting took place at the GDR’s Ministry of Defence in Strausberg, outside Berlin. Present was Grechko’s chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Grigori Ariko, and his East German opposite number, General Sigfried Redel.
The agenda of the 25 July meeting was the ‘securing of the sector borders within Berlin and of the ring around Berlin’. The actual sealing of the border would involve only East German border police. Both the Red Army units (armour belonging to the 1st Motorised Division of the 20th Army) and the East German NVA units (tanks and armoured vehicles including gun-carriers) would hold back, remaining one or two kilometres behind the sector border. The actual use of such units was envisaged only if the East German Ministry of the Interior proved unable
to secure the ‘ring’—that is, the outer perimeter of East Berlin, where it met the GDR proper. The exact plans for such an eventuality would be developed over the next ten to fourteen days.
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What the Soviets planned to do in case of an uprising or of military conflict is only partially known. The military archives in Moscow remain closed. What the Soviets certainly rook upon themselves was the creation of a deterrent effect that would inhibit the West, and especially the Americans, from aggressively opposing the sealing of the Berlin sector borders.
Throughour the summer, a stream of Soviet reinforcements, especially tank units and aerial reconnaissance forces, headed for the GDR. Facilities and armaments were upgraded. On 16 July, a massive exercise took place near Archangelsk, on the Arctic Circle, involving the USSR’s strategic-missile forces. Two long-range ICBMs of type R-7A were launched—the only ones the Soviets possessed that were capable of reaching American territory carrying a nuclear payload (in this case five megatons). The Soviets knew that the West was capable of monitoring all such exercises in thorough detail. The point would not be lost on Washington.
Meanwhile, a high-profile appointment was made that would also send a message to the West. The World War Two hero and former Soviet Deputy Defence Minister Marshal Ivan Konev was recalled from retirement at sixty-three to take over as Commander of Soviet Forces in Germany. Konev was an acknowledged urban-warfare specialist who shared with Marshal Zhukov the laurels for the capture of Berlin in 1945 and also—notoriously—had commanded the forces that eleven years later crushed the Hungarian resistance in Budapest. His appointment was a typically brash Khrushchev public-relations stunt.
Did Khrushchev’s psychological plan have any effect? Perhaps. Kennedy’s television address had made it clear that, while America was boosting its defence capacity, this was explicitly for the protection of West Berlin. No mention was made of Berlin as a whole. Five days later, on 30 July, the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arkansas Democratic senator J. William Fulbright, went much further. He did not understand, he said, why the East Germans had not closed their border, which they had ‘a perfect right to do’. The Soviets definitely took notice of that. It was practically an invitation.
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President Kennedy himself was privately aware of the limits of what could be done without risking a major, possibly cataclysmic war. He told his aide Walt Rostow during a private conversation a few days after his 25 July speech:
Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let that happen. If he loses East Germany, then he loses Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe as well. He cannot let that happen…He will have to do something to stop the flow of refugees—perhaps a wall. And we won’t be able to prevent it. I can hold the {Western} alliance together to defend West Berlin, but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.
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The poker game was not, of course, a one-sided affair. Khrushchev held a strong hand because of West Berlin’s geographical vulnerability and the seeming unwillingness of America to go to war over the question of four-power control of the city. As early as 20 July, he did, however, have a warning from the Chairman of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin. Shelepin told him that NATO was preparing for conflict and that, if the promised peace treaty with the GDR were to involve the closing-off of the transit routes to West Berlin, then the West was prepared to use force to restore access.
Raise you
, so to speak.
Khrushchev’s calibration of the border closure was therefore crucial. To intimidate without provoking, to go as far as he could without going too far. These were fine judgements.
Moscow planned to keep Ulbricht on a short leash. Hence dominant Soviet participation in the planning process—though the idea had originated and been promoted by Ulbricht. And hence the trimming of excessively ambitious, not to say dangerous, East German suggestions. These included Ulbricht’s hair-raising proposal to close West Berlin’s airports by blocking the corridors with East German and Soviet aircraft, floating giant barrage balloons over the airports, and systematically jamming the airwaves, so that all civil air traffic would have to be redirected via East Berlin—Schönefeld. Such plans were firmly nipped in the bud.
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By 27 July, a map produced jointly by Soviet and East German staff officers showed the route of a barrier running through the heart of Berlin.
On the last day of July, Interior Minister Karl Maron issued an order to the Commander of Border Police. The commander was instructed ‘under maintenance of the strictest secrecy and in the shortest possible time, to plan and prepare the strengthened military-architectural extension of the state border between the GDR and West Berlin’.
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