Authors: Frederick Taylor
On 1 August, border-police units, in co-operation with the Transport Ministry, began putting together the materials that would be needed for this initial phase of the operation. These included 18,200 concrete posts, 150 tons of barbed wire (a very precious commodity in the East Bloc), five tons of binding wire, and two tons of staples. Aside from this, materials were also scraped together to create a temporary barrier all around the ‘Berlin ring’, totalling 146.3 kilometres. The plan was not just to seal off West Berlin from East Berlin but to create a less formidable but none the less effective barrier to insulate East Berlin from its provincial hinterland. The barbed wire required for this entire extended project was more than 300 tons.
The Communist command economy may not have been able to provide a decent standard of living for its people, or to adequately maintain the country’s once-proud architectural and industrial fabric, but for such a project as the border closure it was the perfect instrument. The apparatus for the border-sealing operation was largely in place by the beginning of August. This massive undertaking was being achieved at a breakneck speed, made even more remarkable by the fact that most of those involved had no precise conception of where their labours were leading.
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One more matter remained to be settled before the final order was given. The border closure must be presented as a defensive action on the part of the entire Warsaw Pact. This would show the West that the entire Communist world was behind the operation.
On 3 August 1961, Ulbricht and his team travelled to Moscow for a key meeting of the Warsaw Pact’s Political Advisory Committee. Technically, the other satellite countries were to be consulted, but it seems probable that the border-closure operation was already a done deal before the plenary meetings began.
Ulbricht’s handwritten notes of his preparatory tête-à-tête with
Khrushchev indicate this, as does the fact that the main features of the dramatic move in Berlin—and a text of the Warsaw Pact declaration that would accompany it—had already been approved by the Soviet Presidium on the morning of 3 August, before the actual Warsaw Pact meeting began. The same applied to the date set for the operation: 13 August 1961. Khrushchev had already formally approved the border closure, but he re-emphasised that it remained a defensive measure. As he told Ulbricht at this private meeting, the East Germans were ‘not to go a millimetre further’. There was to be no encroaching on West Berlin territory.
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Khrushchev’s opening speech later that day called for unity on all matters, including the economic ones that would arise from a separate peace treaty with the GDR and from ‘practical measures which must be taken in the near future’ (by which he meant the Berlin border closure). He also referred specifically to Kennedy’s 25 July speech and the American’s threat to go to war if the East tried to liquidate the occupation regime in West Berlin. It was both an assurance that he would not go too far, and a warning to the likes of Ulbricht, who showed a tendency to do so.
Leaders of other Warsaw Pact states had opposed the notion of a Berlin border closure back in March, when Ulbricht first brought it up. Now they more or less nodded the operation through. Gomulka, the Polish Communist leader, claimed that he especially had pushed for it all along. The exodus through Berlin had already led to political disruption and economic problems in the GDR’s eastern neighbour.
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So far, so good. But no one could be sure what sanctions, besides military ones, the West would impose in response to the closing-off of East Berlin. East Germany, with its dependence on Western spare parts and close informal economic links with West Germany, was especially vulnerable to a total Western economic boycott. Thus the second important point on the agenda of the Warsaw Pact meeting. Ulbricht needed to be sure that the other Warsaw Pact countries would lend economic support to the GDR if such a crisis occurred.
However, at this point, despite Khrushchev’s appeal for solidarity, the satellite leaders’ reaction turned cool, even hostile. Most pleaded that they could not help the GDR economically because of their own
problems. This was particularly true of states such as Poland and Hungary, whose relatively liberal governments had become reliant on food and grain imports from the West. In Hungary’s case, 30 per cent of the country’s trade was with the capitalist world, and 25 per cent of that with West Germany.
Ulbricht had been coming to Moscow and the Warsaw Pact states cap in hand for years, blaming East Germany’s problems on West German ‘militarists’ and ‘revanchists’ rather than his regime’s neo-Stalinist ineptitude. The August meeting was the point at which, we know, the other satellites tried to dig their heels in and say ‘enough’. Even Khrushchev was awakening to this reality. The embassy in East Berlin had already told him that ‘material facts alone’ were not enough to explain the exodus from the country. His own international department, under future KGB boss Yuri Andropov, would soon express scepticism about the effectiveness of repeated ‘pump-priming’ aid to the GDR.
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But Khrushchev was stubborn. The prestige of the USSR—and therefore his own—was at stake, and such considerations were more important than more economics.
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The USSR had already sold fifty-three tons of gold on the world market to help the GDR through the coming crisis with credits and special supply deals, as well as to reinforce and re-equip its forces in East Germany.
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Khrushchev could do little to persuade the satellite leaders to tighten their own people’s belts to help the East Germans. None of this, however, changed his decision on Berlin. All the more reason, in fact, to seal off the GDR, integrate it more fully into the Communist COMECON system, and thus systematically reduce its dependency on the West.
Ulbricht had pointed out to Khrushchev that the open border, and the higher standard of living available in West Germany, forced the East German regime to ‘artificially’ increase the standard of living of its people. This Canute-like attempt to keep East Germans happy with their lot and thus slow the westward tide meant that the GDR had to import much more from the West than was desirable. Ulbricht’s implication was clear: once East Germans were sealed into their country, unable to leave for the West, the regime could concentrate on austerity policies and consumer cut-backs with less heed for popular discontent.
Ulbricht made the arguments for the border closure starkly clear in his lengthy speech to the Warsaw Pact leaders on Friday 4 August, then concluded:
This situation necessitates the introduction of a regulation stipulating that at a certain time the government border of the GDR (going through Berlin)
be closed and
may be crossed by citizens of the GDR only in the presence of the corresponding permission for exit or, in so far as it concerns visits to West Berlin by citizens of the capital of the GDR, with a special pass
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[emphasis added].
The emphasised words, which made the drastic nature of the plan perfectly clear, were included in Ulbricht’s original speech, but disappeared from the official Russian translation and from printed reports, presumably for security reasons.
So Ulbricht got his way, though not the enthusiastic offers of economic support he had hoped for.
The East German leader flew home on 5 August. On Monday 7 August, he finally informed the entire Politburo of the Moscow discussions and of the plan to close the border on Sunday 13 August 1961.
On the ground in Berlin, the American diplomatic and intelligence officials responsible for assessing the situation had no real idea what was about to happen.
There was much discussion of the refugee problem, and of how far they could push without endangering both the West’s intelligence-gathering activities in the GDR and its military-political status within Berlin itself. Both sides in the Cold War saw Berlin as a vital listening-post, cockpit of a silent struggle for knowledge and control. Both sides actively spied on each other and worked to destabilise each other’s spheres of influence in Germany—although, of course, Communists only ever referred to the West’s covert activities, never their own. The West was also, it must be said, keen on ‘deniability’.
There was a lot of bluff and counter-bluff going on. Each side, in its own way, overestimated its own power. For instance, at the end of June, the American President’s National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy,
issued an action memorandum. This requested the State Department’s and the CIA’s advice on ‘preparations…for inciting progressively increasing instability in East Germany and Eastern Europe, at such a time after 15 October as it may be ordered’. Tellingly, he also asked how this ‘capability’ to undermine the East Bloc might be brought to the attention of the Soviets before they made their decision on Berlin.
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Bundy wanted to ‘send a signal’ to Khrushchev. The fifteenth of October would see the opening of the XXII. Congress of the CPSU in Moscow. There, before the assembled Communist parties of the world, Khrushchev was expected to announce a separate peace treaty with East Germany and the associated measures that might unleash a world crisis. Clearly Washington thought that the crisis would not come to a head before that date.
In June 1961, former head of the Berlin Operations Bureau (essentially the CIA station, which reported directly to Washington) Bill Harvey had already given a brutally frank assessment of what was and was not possible:
It is unrealistic to believe that we could infiltrate into the East Zone a sleeper net of sufficient size, reliability, and skill to…play a part in organising resistance groups…Our abilities are not equal to this task when balanced against the defensive capability of the [East German] Ministry of State Security.
There was a mis-match between the dreams of Washington official-dom and appraisals by those on the spot. Where Bundy talked blithely of destabilising East Germany and of taking action to ‘increase the refugee flow’, the Berlin hands were much more cautious. After all, what could be more perfectly calculated to justify the Soviets’ and East Germans’ constant accusations of Western sabotage, espionage and subversion? The CIA even suggested, in late June 1961, that active subversion and attempts to encourage the refugee problem in East Germany ‘might very well precipitate a Berlin crisis by forcing the East to blockade the city’.
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In other words, the effect of Bundy’s ‘signal’ might be the exact opposite of what he intended. Instead of discouraging the Soviets, it would make them even more determined to cleanse the ‘Augean stables’
of West Berlin by turning it into a neutralised free city under strong Communist influence. It might even provoke them to seize it by force.
Kennedy’s 25 July television address was a turning-point. The speech reflected a coldly realistic reappraisal on his part, a kind of cost/benefit analysis. Hitherto the policy had been to keep undermining the GDR and hope it would collapse into the arms of the West. Now, with the Russians unwilling to let this happen, Kennedy decided to pull back to a more defensible position. If the Soviets took measures to shore up East Germany, so be it. The alternative was nuclear war, and who wanted to risk nuclear war over the (by now largely notional) four-power status of Berlin?
However, the West, including the US, was still making calculations based on a crisis in late autumn/early winter, with a Soviet-East German peace treaty following the XXII. Communist Party Congress and precipitating possible conflict over the status of Berlin. The West thought, wrongly, that it had time to work out a strategy.
Four-power talks between Foreign Ministers of Britain, France, the USA and West Germany took place from 4 to 9 August 1961, in Paris. The meeting in Paris took a leisurely view. It agreed that preparations might be made to discuss Berlin with the Russians in October or November. No date was set for announcing this Western willingness to talk.
These discussions overlapped with the Warsaw Pact meeting at which, unknown to the West, the 13 August Berlin border closure was agreed.
One jarring note of urgency among the complacent Foreign Ministers in Paris came in a message from Mayor Brandt of West Berlin. He warned them of the painful effects of growing East German repression and expressed his fear that the population’s situation could worsen ‘if the Berlin door were to close’. Secretary of State Rusk was stirred to suggest that ‘an attempt to seal off the refugees…might lead to an explosion and precipitate the problems under consideration sooner than expected’.
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But no practical remedy was suggested. Perhaps none was possible.
That repression was increasing inside the GDR, there could be no doubt. On 2 August, a new campaign of intimidation against ‘border-crossers’ began—even though the closure of the border, which would make such choices irrelevant, was only ten days away.
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The ‘border-crossers’ had already been subjected to harassment in their homes. The tenancy agreements of people known to work in West Berlin were queried, in some cases cancelled, rendering them homeless. Now came more swoops on Easterners crossing into West Berlin, particularly at the beginning of the working day. Those who worked in West Berlin or were suspected of doing so were arrested and questioned. Others were summoned to government employment offices, where they were instructed to leave their employment in the West and seek work in the ‘capital of the workers’ and peasants’ state’.
Many decided it was time to get out.